e 

HARY 


*> 


FROM   THE   LIFE 

Portrait  Studies  of  Some 
Distinguished  Americans 


"l  DON'T  LIVE   ANYWHERE,"   SHE   SAID   AT  LAST 


Seep.  22 


FROM  THE  LIFE 

Imaginary  Portraits  of  Some 
Distinguished  Americans 


BY 

HARVEY  O'HIGGINS 

Author  of 

"ADVENTURES  OF  DETECTTOI  BARNEY" 
"THE  SMOKE-EATERS  "  ETC. 


HARPER   &   BROTHERS   PUBLISHERS 

NEW  YORK  AND   LONDON 


FROM  THE  LIFE 

Copyright,  1919,   by   Harper  &  Brother* 

Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 

Published  September,  1919 


H-T 


CONTENTS 

PAOB 

OWEN  CAREY 3 

JANE  SHORE 45 

THOMAS  WALES  WARREN 89 

BENJAMIN  McNEiL  MURDOCK 129 

CONRAD  NORMAN 171 

W.  T 217 

HON.  BENJAMIN  P.  DIVTNS 245 

SIR  WATSON  TYLER       269 

DISTRICT-ATTORNEY  WICKSON .  305 


FROM  THE  LIFE 

Owen  Carey 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


OWEN  CAREY 

CAREY,  Owen,  author;  6.  July  16, 1867; 
ed.  pub.  schools;  m.  Mary  Fleming, 
August  23,  1903;  newspaper  work  in 
New  York  City,  1897-1900.  Author: 
Fair  Anne  Hathaway,  1900;  The 
Queen's  Quest,  1901;  Sweet  Rosalind, 
1902;  With  Crash  of  Shield,  1903;  In 
Cloth  of  Gold,  1903;  The  King's  Ene- 
mies, 1904;  The  Forest  of  Arden, 
1905;  Men  at  Arms,  1905;  Lady 
Jane  Grey,  1906;  The  Swan's  Inn, 
1908;  Friends  at  Court,  1909;  Rob- 
in's Roundelay,  1911;  The  Gage  of 
Battle,  1912;  Miles  Poyndexter,  1913; 
Milhcent  Lamar,  1914;  The  Bang's 
Evil,  1916;  Mistress  Page,  1917.  Ad- 
dress: Authors'  League,  New  York 
City.— Who's  Who. 


OF  course  you  know  Owen  Carey.  That  is  to 
say,  you  know  his  name.  And  you  know  his 
books.  And  you  know  the  plays  that  have  been 
made  from  his  books,  and  the  moving-picture 
films  that  have  been  made  from  the  plays  that 
have  been  made  from  his  books.  And  you  know 
the  syndicate  portrait  of  him  that  has  been  going 
the  rounds  of  literary  supplements  and  publishers' 
announcements  for  the  last  fifteen  years.  And  if 

[3] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


you  have  looked  him  up  in  Who's  Who  and  the 
biographical  dictionaries  you  know  enough  about 
him  to  be  able  to  write  the  dates  on  his  tomb- 
stone. But  of  the  man  himself  it  is  safe  to  say 
that  you  know  nothing. 

Or  suppose  that  you  happened  to  know  him  in 
the  flesh.  Suppose  that  you  had  studied  him  in 
the  days  when  he  used  to  attend  the  meetings  of 
the  Executive  Committee  of  the  Authors'  League 
at  its  weekly  luncheon  in  the  City  Club.  Well? 
You  saw  a  ponderous  bulk  of  male  middle  age, 
that  looked  like  Thomas  Edison  somewhat,  and 
somewhat  like  a  Buddha,  and  a  great  deal  like  a 
human  mushroom.  You  observed  him  listening, 
in  massive  silence,  to  arguments  and  motions,  and 
you  heard  him  grunt,  "Aye."  You  noted  the  deft- 
ness with  which  he  made  a  cigarette  in  his  blunted, 
fat  fingers,  and  you  saw  him  light  it  gloomily,  con- 
sume it  in  three  or  four  puffs  and  an  enormous 
final  inhalation,  wash  the  taste  of  it  down  with  a 
gulp  of  whisky-and-water,  and  roll  another  ciga- 
rette with  the  melancholy  air  of  an  elephant  that 
is  being  fed  shelled  peanuts  one  by  one.  Or  you 
watched  him  signing  his  famous  name  to  the 
circular  letters  of  the  League,  with  a  silver-mounted 
fountain-pen  as  big  as  a  bath-tap,  and  as  fluent — 
bestowing  his  signature  on  the  paper  with  a  few 
large  passes  of  his  indifferent  hand,  like  an  arch- 
bishop bestowing  a  benediction,  pontifically.  And 
you  could  not  help  thinking  of  the  stupendous 

[4] 


OWEN   CAREY 


trade  value  of  that  name,  of  the  fabulous  stream 
of  income  that  had  flowed  from  that  fountain-pen, 
of  the  magic  of  his  puffy  hand  that  could  transmute 
a  word  into  a  dollar,  at  his  current  price,  and  add 
the  dollar  to  the  disorderly  roll  of  bills  in  his 
bulging  vest  pocket.  .  .  .  But  of  the  man  himself, 
it  is  safe  to  say,  you  learned  nothing. 

What  business  of  thought  was  being  carried  on 
under  that  thatch  of  gray  hair?  What  was  the 
mind  that  sat  concealed  behind  those  eyes — slow- 
lidded  eyes,  as  impenetrable  in  their  gaze  as  if  they 
were  clear  glass  frosted  on  the  inner  side?  Why  did 
he  always  wear  shabby  gray  clothes?  What  did 
he  do  with  his  money?  Why  did  he  belong  to  no 
clubs  and  go  nowhere? — not  even  to  the  annual 
banquet  of  the  Authors'  League.  Why,  with  all 
this  unceasing  advertisement  of  his  work,  was 
there  no  advertisement  whatever  of  his  personality? 
Why  was  there  not  even  any  curiosity  about  him? 
Why  did  his  books  arouse  none?  Why  were  they, 
for  all  their  circulation,  so  without  significance  to 
their  day  and  age,  so  without  concern  about  its 
problems,  so  without  influence  upon  its  struggle? 
Why  was  he,  in  short,  what  he  was? — as  personally 
inaccessible  as  O.  Henry,  as  withdrawn  from  the 
modern  world  in  all  his  works  as  Maurice  Hewlett 
in  his  early  novels,  as  shy  as  Barrie,  as  fat  as 
Chesterton,  as  impersonal  as  if  his  busy  manu- 
factory of  fiction  were  some  sort  of  flour-mill  over 
which  he  presided  in  his  dusty  miller's  gray, 

[51 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


mechanically  grinding  out  a  grist  that  meant  noth- 
ing to  him  as  an  honest,  artistic  output,  or  as  the 
intellectual  food  of  millions,  or  even  as  the  equiv- 
alent of  comforts  and  social  joys  to  himself. 


It  has  been  said  often  enough  that  there  are 
moments  in  life  when  the  shock  of  some  trifling  in- 
cident seems  suddenly  to  precipitate  and  crystallize 
a  man's  character  —  to  combine  the  elements  of  his 
past  and  set  the  form  of  his  future  —  out  of  a  clear 
solution  of  his  hidden  qualities  of  temperament  and 
absorbed  incidents  of  experience  and  wholly  in- 
visible fermentations  of  thought.  Certainly  there 
was  such  an  incident  in  Carey's  life  —  on  a  rainy 
October  night  in  1899  —  and  I  believe  that  Carey 
may  be  better  explained  by  a  laboratory  study  of 
him  in  the  chemical  processes  of  that  crystallizing 
event  than  by  any  character  analysis  and  empirical 
formula  of  him  as  he  was  afterward. 

In  October,  1899,  then. 

3 

And  even  so  short  a  time  ago  as  that  is  Owen 
Carey  was  unknown;  he  was  poor  and  he  was  thin  — 
although  these  are  now  unbelievable  facts,  all  of 
them.  He  was  trying  to  break  into  the  monthly 
magazines  with  short  stories;  and  the  short  story 
was  a  form  for  which  he  never  had  any  aptitude. 
Meantime,  he  was  writing  specials  for  the  Saturday 

[6] 


OWEN    CAREY 


and  Sunday  papers — chiefly  for  The  Commercial 
Advertiser  and  The  Sun — and  his  literary  life  was 
made  up  of  such  considerations  as  this:  if  The 
Commercial  Advertiser  paid  only  four  dollars  a 
column  and  The  Sun  paid  eight,  but  The  Sun 
printed  2,200  words  in  a  column  and  The  Commer- 
cial Advertiser  had  a  column  of  1,100,  which  was 
'the  more  profitable  to  write  for? 

He  was  earning,  on  an  average,  about  six  dollars 
a  week. 

On  this  particular  night  he  had  been  up  Fifth 
Avenue  as  far  as  the  Park  and  down  Broadway  to 
Madison  Square,  looking  for  a  descriptive  article 
of  any  sort,  in  the  windows  of  the  new  Waldorf- 
Astoria,  in  the  hansom  cabs,  in  the  theater  crowds, 
in  whatever  he  could  see  of  the  night  life  of  the 
Tenderloin  without  paying  for  admittance.  And 
he  was  on  his  way  home,  brooding  over  an  article 
that  he  hoped  to  hatch  out  in  his  room  and  mail 
to  an  editor  if  it  came  to  life. 

He  never  went  to  the  editorial  offices  with  his 
contributions  any  more.  He  had  never  been  able 
to  pass  the  office-boy.  He  was  too  obviously  a 
threadbare  and  eccentric  literary  aspirant;  and 
literary  aspirants  are  the  bane  of  the  newspaper 
editor,  who  does  not  understand  why  a  man  in- 
terested only  in  news  should  be  persecuted  by 
people  who  are  interested  only  in  literature. 

It  was  raining  on  Carey — a  cold  October  rain  that 
rattled  on  the  roof  of  his  straw  hat  and  squashed 
2  [7] 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


about  in  his  broken  summer  shoes.  And  he  was 
not  merely  indifferent  to  the  rain — he  felt  affection- 
ate toward  it.  The  men  and  women  whom  he 
passed  were  protected  against  the  wet  with  um- 
brellas and  waterproofs,  as  if  against  an  enemy. 
They  were  apparently  as  afraid  of  the  rain  as  they 
were  of  poverty.  And  to  Carey  poverty  was  an  old 
familiar,  and  the  rain,  as  the  poets  say,  caressed  his 
face  with  a  pleasant  coolness.  He  was  footsore, 
and  the  water  in  his  shoes  was  even  refreshing. 
He  had  fought  against  poverty  once  with  a  desperate 
fear  of  it,  like  a  man  drowning.  And  now  he  had 
sunk  to  the  depths,  he  was  one  of  "the  submerged 
tenth,"  and  it  was  as  if  he  had  touched  bottom  and 
found  that  he  could  live  and  breathe  there,  peace- 
fully. Poverty! — what  fools  people  were  about  it. 
And  the  rain ! — the  world  had  refused  him  a  shelter 
from  either,  and  neither  had  proved  to  be  a  hardship. 
He  had  a  room  on  the  top  floor  of  an  old  house 
on  the  south  side  of  Washington  Square.  It  was  a 
house  that  had  been  sold  to  make  way  for  a  new 
building,  and  some  hitch  in  finances  had  halted  the 
project  after  all  the  tenants  had  been  moved  out 
and  the  gas-pipes  had  been  disconnected.  Carey 
had  hung  on,  alone,  with  a  kerosene-lamp  and  an 
oil-stove  on  which  he  did  his  cooking.  He  ex- 
pected any  day  to  come  home  and  find  the  house- 
wreckers  at  work  and  his  staircase  gone.  As  he 
rounded  the  Washington  Arch  he  looked  up, 
mechanically,  to  see  whether  his  roof  was  still  whole. 

[8J 


OWEN    CAREY 


It  was.  He  heard  a  dog  give  a  sort  of  shivering 
whine  somewhere,  and  he  stopped  at  once  and 
stood  looking  about  for  it. 


If  I  tell  you  this,  you'll  believe  that  Carey  was  not 
quite  normal — morbid,  a  bit  mad — but  it  is  true 
that  the  sound  of  suffering  from  an  animal  went 
through  him  more  piercingly  than  a  human  appeal. 
When  he  walked  in  the  country  his  gait  was  erratic 
because  he  was  always  stepping  aside  to  avoid 
treading  on  ants.  In  one  of  his  early  stories — so 
unanimously  rejected  by  the  magazines — his  hero- 
ine went  out  strolling  with  her  lover;  she  saw  him 
pick  up  a  stone  and  throw  it  at  a  bird  which,  by 
some  miracle,  he  hit;  she  promptly  turned  home,  in 
silence,  and  refused  ever  to  speak  to  him  again; 
and  it  was  impossible  for  Carey  to  understand  that 
this  was  not  a  "sufficient  motive"  for  his  plot. 
Most  striking  of  all,  perhaps:  his  mother,  a  re- 
ligious zealot,  had  intended  her  son  to  be  "a 
minister  of  the  gospel";  she  had  planned  to  send 
him  to  a  theological  college  and,  being  too  poor 
to  carry  out  the  plan,  she  went  to  her  pastor  for 
aid  and  advice.  He  replied  that  the  boy  should 
first  familiarize  himself  with  the  testaments,  and 
Carey  set  to  work  to  study  them  ambitiously — 
with  an  unexpected  result!  The  cruelties  of  the 
Old  Testament  horrified  him.  Without  any  in- 
tention of  blasphemy,  in  the  most  obvious  sincerity, 

[91 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


he  appealed  to  his  mother  to  explain  the  murders 
and  massacres  ordered  by  Jehovah  and  carried  out 
by  the  Chosen  People.  She  took  him  to  the  pastor. 
The  pastor  examined  him  and  decided  that  he 
lacked  the  necessary  firmness  of  faith.  They 
prayed  for  him — all  three  on  their  knees  in  the 
pastor's  study,  Carey  praying  as  fervently  as  the 
others — and  when  he  rose  he  was  surprised  to  find 
that  he  was  "no  better.'*  Those  terrible  bar- 
barisms of  the  early  Hebrews  still  revolted  him. 
He  made  a  list  of  them,  filled  a  note-book  with 
them,  and  went  back  to  the  pastor.  He  and  the 
reverend  gentleman  quarreled.  Carey  shook  the 
pages  of  his  indictment  in  the  face  of  the  horrified 
minister,  and  cried:  "It  wasn't  a  god!  It  was  a 
devil!"  He  was  put  out  on  the  pious  door-step, 
sobbing,  defiantly:  "A  devil!  A  devil!'*  The 
minister  preached  a  sermon  about  him,  in  which  no 
names  were  mentioned,  but  all  his  friends  under- 
stood who  was  referred  to,  and  they  spread  the 
secret.  He  was  marked  as  an  atheist.  His  home 
life  became  unbearable.  He  ran  away,  was  brought 
back,  ran  away  again,  changed  his  name,  and  was 
not  traced.  He  never  returned.  His  mother  de- 
veloped religious  hallucinations  and  went  to  an 
asylum  for  the  insane.  And  that  is  why  Who's 
Who  gives  no  birthplace  for  him,  and  names  no 
parents.  The  story  that  he  was  a  foundling  is 
not  true. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  his  real  name  was  John 

[10] 


OWEN    CAREY 


Aloysius  McGillicuddy,  the  son  of  Patrick  McGilli- 
cuddy,  the  driver  of  a  brewery  wagon,  Irish,  and  a 
Catholic.  His  unfortunate  mother  was  Annie  Kirke, 
a  servant,  Scotch,  and  a  Presbyterian.  After  her 
marriage  she  kept  a  boarding-house.  The  father 
had  his  son  christened  in  the  Catholic  faith;  the 
mother  was  determined  that  he  should  be  a  Pres- 
byterian; and  she  had  her  way — after  her  husband 
tired  of  quarrels  and  deserted  her — until  the  son 
followed  in  the  father's  footsteps.  And  young  Jack 
McGillicuddy,  under  an  assumed  name  that  became 
"Owen  Carey"  finally,  worked  as  an  errand  boy, 
as  a  shoe  clerk,  in  a  printer's  office,  in  a  press-room 
— in  Toledo,  in  Chicago,  in  Boston — tramping, 
beating  his  way  on  freight-trains,  working  at  any- 
thing temporary,  even  begging  when  he  had  to — an 
absurd,  sensitive,  eccentric  young  victim  of  his  own 
intenseness,  whose  one  consistent  impression  of 
mankind  was  its  good-natured  inhumanity. 

That  was  why  the  whine  of  an  animal  affected 
him  more  than  a  human  appeal.  He  had  a  fellow- 
feeling  for  the  animal.  So,  to  return  to  his  October 
night  in  1899— 


He  looked  around  for  the  dog,  but  he  did  not 
see  any.  He  saw  a  woman  sitting  on  one  of  the 
wet  benches  of  the  Square,  and  the  whine  seemed 
to  come  from  her.  He  supposed  that  she  had  the 
dog  on  her  lap. 

Hi] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


As  he  neared  her  he  saw  that  it  was  her  hat  she 
was  nursing.  She  had  taken  it  off  and  covered  it 
with  a  handkerchief  to  protect  it  from  the  rain, 
and  her  hair  was  soaked  and  glistening  in  the  light 
of  the  electric  lamp  above  her.  He  supposed  that 
she  was  a  woman  of  the  streets. 

At  his  approach  she  looked  up,  and  he  had  just 
time  to  appreciate  that  she  was  young  and  rather 
pretty,  when  she  shivered  and  whined  up  at  him; 
and,  opening  her  mouth,  with  her  tongue  protrud- 
ing over  her  lower  teeth,  she  panted  at  him,  in- 
gratiatingly, like  a  dog. 

For  a  moment  Carey  thought  he  had  gone  crazy. 
Then,  "It's  hydrophobia!"  he  thought.  "She's  been 
bitten  by  a  mad  dog!" 

He  looked  around  for  a  policeman,  frightened. 

His  future  was  determined  by  the  fact  that  there 
was  no  policeman  in  sight  and  he  had  time  to  recol- 
lect that  it  was  one  of  his  many  grievances  against 
mankind  that  dogs  with  minor  ailments  were  always 
being  shot  as  mad  when,  as  he  was  convinced, 
rabies  was  a  disease  as  rare  as  leprosy. 

He  approached  her  much  as  he  would  have  ap- 
proached the  dog  in  the  same  circumstances.  He 
asked,  "What's  the  matter?" 

She  did  not  answer. 

He  bent  down  to  her,  putting  his  hand  on  her 
shoulder.  "What  is  it?" 

She  shivered  under  his  touch. 

"Aren't  you  well?" 

[12] 


OWEN    CAREY 


Her  face  suddenly  changed  and  cleared.  She 
stared  at  him  blankly.  An  expression  of  frightened 
bewilderment  came  into  her  eyes,  as  if  she  had 
been  wakened  from  a  nightmare. 

He  sat  down  beside  her.  "What  s  the  matter?" 
he  asked.  "You're  soaked  through.  Why  don't 
you  go  home?" 

She  did  not  reply. 

He  put  his  hand  on  her  arm.  "Tell  me,"  he  said. 
"Aren't  you  well?  What's  wrong?  Can  I  help 
you?" 

And  she  answered,  in  a  breathy,  hoarse  gasp  of 
exhaustion,  "I'm  hungry." 

"Come  along  with  me,"  he  said.  "Can  you 
walk?"  And,  taking  her  by  the  elbow,  he  helped 
her  to  her  feet.  Her  hat  dropped  to  the  sidewalk 
as  she  rose.  He  picked  it  up,  put  the  handkerchief 
in  his  pocket,  tucked  the  hat  under  his  arm,  and 
started  across  the  Square  with  her. 

She  staggered  as  if  her  feet  were  numb. 

It  was  apparent  that  he  could  not  take  her  to 
a  restaurant  in  that  condition,  even  if  there  had 
been  a  cheap  restaurant  near.  But  he  had  no 
thought  of  going  to  a  restaurant.  He  had  not  money 
enough  to  pay  restaurant  prices.  He  had  food  in 
his  room,  and  he  was  taking  her  there,  to  give  it 
to  her. 

He  had  already  concluded  that  her  doglike 
whining  and  panting  had  been  an  illusion;  that  he 
had  seen  something  like  it,  but  not  that!  And  he 

US] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


was  going  over  the  contents  of  his  larder  in  his 
mind  as  he  helped  her  across  the  Square.  He  did 
not  speak.  And  she  was  obviously  too  weak  to 
speak. 

6 

There  was  a  characteristic  reason  why  he  did 
not  consider  taking  her  to  a  restaurant. 

He  had  made  a  study  of  foods  and  their  prices — 
a  study  as  careful  as  any  that  he  made  subse- 
quently into  the  details  of  life  and  local  color  for 
his  romances  of  Elizabethan  and  medieval  times. 
And  he  understood  how  grossly  the  restaurants 
overcharged.  He  knew,  for  example,  that  rolled 
oats,  in  bulk,  cost  him  two  and  one-half  cents  a 
pound;  that  there  were  six  teacupfuls  in  a  pound, 
and  that  half  a  teacupful  made  a  portion  for  one 
meal.  Cornmeal,  at  two  cents  a  pound,  gave  only 
four  cups  to  the  pound;  oatmeal,  at  two  and  a  half 
cents  a  pound,  ran  five  cups  to  the  pound;  and 
hominy,  at  five  cents  a  pound,  four  cups  to  the 
pound.  (These,  of  course,  were  the  prices  of  1899.) 
He  paid  30  cents  a  pound  for  coffee;  there  were 
96  teaspoonfuls  in  a  pound;  and  he  used  a  teaspoon- 
ful  to  a  cup  of  coffee — stingily.  He  paid  50  cents 
for  a  pound  of  tea,  of  128  teaspoonfuls.  He  had 
figured  out  that  granulated  sugar  cost  him  one- 
eighth  of  a  cent  for  a  spoonful.  There  were,  usually. 
240  potatoes  in  a  bushel,  and  a  cent's  worth  made 
a  portion.  He  had  learned  where  to  get  meat 


OWEN    CAREY 


enough  for  one  meal  for  10  cents — remnants,  rather, 
but  edible.  He  made  a  two-cent  package  of  salt 
last  him  about  three  months,  and  he  sprinkled  8 
cents'  worth  of  pepper  over  as  long  a  period.  On 
an  average  his  meals  cost  him  $2.03  a  week.  And, 
naturally,  a  restaurant  looked  like  a  robber's  cave 
to  him. 

He  had  covered  pages  of  his  note-books  with 
these  calculations.  It  was  not  only  impossible  to 
overcharge  him.  It  was  equally  impossible  to  give 
him  underweight,  because  he  knew  the  number  of 
spoonfuls  that  ought  to  be  in  any  pound  of  staple 
groceries,  and  he  measured  every  pound  when  he 
got  alone  with  it. 

Having  a  mind  of  that  quality,  it  is  strange — 
isn't  it? — that  he  ever  became  a  romanticist. 


He  took  the  girl  as  far  as  his  street  door  without 
much  difficulty,  but  he  had  to  support  her  up  the 
steps,  and  it  was  plain  that  her  legs  were  too  weak 
to  climb  three  flights  of  stairs.  Her  knees  gave 
under  her.  He  brought  her  to  the  first  landing  with 
an  arm  about  her,  practically  carrying  her,  swaying 
and  stumbling  in  the  dark.  There  he  dropped  her 
hat  in  a  corner  and  picked  her  up  bodily.  She  made 
no  sound.  Although  she  was  tall,  she  weighed 
little  more  than  a  toggle- jointed  skeleton  wrapped 
in  soaked  clothing.  He  judged  that  she  had  fainted. 

He  laid  her  on  the  floor  of  his  landing  until  he 

[15] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


got  his  door  open  and  his  lamp  lit.  Then  he  carried 
her  in  and  put  her  on  his  bed — a  camp  cot,  without 
a  mattress,  for  which  he  had  paid  fifty  cents  in  a 
second-hand  shop  of  the  tenement  quarter.  It  was 
covered  with  nothing  but  a  pair  of  gray  blankets, 
and  he  was  not  afraid  of  soiling  them.  Her  head 
lay,  dripping,  on  a  pillow  that  had  no  pillow-case, 
and  she  looked  as  if  she  had  been  drowned.  Her 
lips  were  white,  but  her  face  was  a  yellowish  green. 
For  a  moment  he  was  afraid  that  she  had  died  in 
his  arms.  A  faint  breath  reassured  him.  He  hast- 
ened to  light  his  oil-stove  and  warm  up  the  remains 
of  his  day's  coffee,  which  he  had  drawn  off  the 
grounds  to  save  it. 

While  the  coffee  was  heating  he  unbuttoned  her 
worn  shoes  and  drew  them  off.  Her  stockings  were 
just  as  wet  as  her  shoes,  so  he  removed  her  stock- 
ings, too,  tugging  at  them  gingerly  at  the  heels  and 
ankles,  and  bringing  off,  with  them,  a  pair  of  ex- 
hausted-looking round  garters.  Her  feet  were  as 
chilled  as  if  they  had  been  on  ice,  and  he  had  a 
queer  idea  that  they  had  shrunken  with  the  cold 
— they  were  so  small.  He  rubbed  them  dry  with 
his  only  towel,  and  bandaged  the  towel  around  them 
to  get  them  warm. 

When  the  coffee  was  ready  he  poured  it  into  his 
tin  cup  and  took  it  to  her,  clear.  "Here,"  he  said, 
raising  hex  to  a  sitting  posture,  "this  will  brace  you." 

She  whined,  with  her  eyes  closed. 

He  put  the  cup  to  her  lips.    "Try  a  mouthful." 

[16] 


OWEN    CAREY 


She  stuck  out  her  tongue  as  if  to  lap  it. 

"No,  no,"  he  said.  "Drink  it.  Open  your  mouth 
and  drink  it." 

She  laid  her  hand  on  his,  pressed  the  cup  away 
from  her,  and  stared  down  at  it.  Then  she  sighed 
and  drank  a  mouthful.  It  was  a  rank  draught. 

"It  m-makes  me  sick,"  she  faltered,  nauseated, 
turning  away  from  it. 

"All  right,"  he  said.    "I'll  warm  some  milk." 

She  fell  back  on  the  pillow  and  closed  her  eyes 
again.  But  the  coffee  had  evidently  done  some- 
thing to  revive  her,  for  when  he  brought  her  the 
milk — with  his  last  spoonful  of  whisky  in  it — she 
drank  it  greedily.  He  followed  it  with  a  hard-boiled 
egg,  chopped  fine,  and  a  slice  of  scorched  bread, 
flavored  with  kerosene,  from  the  top  of  his  oil-stove. 
He  fed  the  egg  to  her  in  a  spoon,  encouraging  her; 
and  she  ate  the  toast  without  his  help.  "Now," 
he  said,  "you'll  have  to  take  off  some  of  these  wet 
clothes.  You  can  put  on  my  overcoat." 

It  was  his  winter's  coat,  from  a  nail  behind  the 
door.  She  let  him  unbutton  her  dress  down  the  back, 
get  her  arms  and  shoulders  out  of  it,  wrap  her  in 
the  overcoat,  and  draw  the  dripping  gown  off  over 
her  feet.  The  thinness  of  her  girlish  arms,  and  the 
hollows  in  her  neck  and  shoulders,  were  no  more 
pathetic  than  the  poverty  of  the  Canton-flannel 
petticoat  that  she  wore.  He  buttoned  the  coat  on 
her;  and  she  lay  on  her  back,  gazing  at  the  sloping 
ceiling,  in  a  weak  stupor. 

117] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  hung  up  her  dress — a  faded  blue-serge  gown 
that  had  been  darned  on  the  elbows — and  he  placed 
the  oil-stove  under  it,  to  dry  it.  He  proceeded  to 
make  her  a  cup  of  tea,  and  to  fry,  in  slices,  some 
cornmeal  mush  that  remained  from  breakfast.  This 
he  served  with  syrup.  She  ate  it  in  hungry  silence, 
with  her  bloodshot  eyes  fixed  on  nothing.  He  got 
the  impression  that  speech  and  tears  had  both  been 
exhausted  for  her. 

When  her  plate  was  clean  and  her  cup  empty 
he  took  them  from  her,  and  she  lay  down  again, 
on  her  side,  and  seemed  to  go  to  sleep.  He  stood 
a  moment,  considering  her.  She  was,  surely,  not 
more  than  twenty  years  old;  he  was  thirty-two; 
and  there  was  nothing  in  his  thought  but  fraternal 
pity  for  her.  She"  was  apparently  a  young  street- 
walker, but  he  had  lived  on  the  streets  himself  for 
the  greater  part  of  fifteen  years;  and  if  she  was  an 
outcast — well,  so  was  he.  She  looked  desperately 
frail;  the  bones  protruded  in  her  cheeks  and  her 
temples;  her  eyes  were  sunken  and  dark  in  their 
sockets;  her  teeth  showed  between  pinched  lips. 
It  was  merely  a  girlish  face,  but  suffering  had 
marked  it  with  ascetic  lines  of  character  and  in- 
telligence. 

He  decided  that  what  she  needed  most  was  food. 
He  counted  the  silver  in  his  pocket,  did  a  problem 
in  mental  arithmetic  with  his  eyes  on  the  calendar, 
and  went  out  noiselessly  to  buy  her  something  to 
eat.  She  was  still  sleeping  when  he  returned — 

[18] 


OWEN    CAREY 


with  her  hat,  and  a  bottle  of  milk,  and  some  slices 
of  boiled  ham  from  a  delicatessen  shop,  and  a  loaf 
of  bread,  and  a  greasy  paper  bag  of  potato  chips. 
He  moved  an  empty  box  to  the  side  of  the  bed  and 
arranged  the  food  on  it,  but  he  did  not  waken  her. 
It  would  be  better  to  let  her  rest. 

He  took  off  his  wet  coat,  removed  the  cooking- 
dishes  from  his  pine  table  to  the  floor,  and  sat  down 
in  his  kitchen-chair  to  write. 

8 

You  see,  he  was  already  a  professional.  No 
amateur  would  have  been  able  to  write  under  the 
circumstances.  The  girl  in  the  room,  her  misery, 
her  uncanny  trick  of  whining — not  to  mention  his 
own  discomforts  of  damp  shoulders  and  soaked 
feet — these  things  would  have  distracted  any  one 
for  whom  work  had  not  become  a  professional  habit, 
any  one  to  whom  writing  was  not  the  essential 
activity  of  his  life  and  the  justification  of  his  ex- 
istence, as  necessary  to  him  as  food,  as  consoling 
as  tobacco,  his  refuge  from  every  worry — from  the 
struggle  with  reality,  the  obstinacy  of  circumstance, 
the  intractable  enmity  of  events  that  always  con- 
tradicted imagination  and  falsified  hope — the  refuge 
to  which  he  went  to  escape  all  the  impotences  of 
mortality  as  the  religious  go  to  prayer. 

He  began  to  shape  up  his  newspaper  article,  with 
his  hand  in  his  hair,  tugging  at  it  thoughtfully  as 
*he  wrote.  (And  it  was  this  continual  scalp-massage, 

[191 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


probably,  that  preserved  for  him  the  characteristic 
disorderly  gray  shock  of  his  later  years.)  There 
was  nothing  particularly  characteristic  about  his 
room.  He  had  piled  a  number  of  empty  soap- 
boxes on  their  sides  to  make  book-shelves  and  a 
dresser.  An  old  steamer-trunk  held  all  his  clothes. 
He  had  hung  a  blanket  over  his  window,  as  a  blind; 
and  he  left  it  over  the  window  even  in  daytime, 
and  lit  his  lamp,  because  he  had  become  so  accus- 
tomed to  writing  at  night  that  the  daylight  seemed 
to  blanch  his  inspiration.  The  lamp  was  shaded 
by  a  sheet  of  copy-paper,  with  a  circular  hole  in 
the  center  of  it,  that  slowly  settled  down  on  the 
chimney  as  the  heat  scorched  it.  A  little  bust  of 
Shakespeare,  from  which  the  pedestal  had  been 
broken,  hung  above  the  table  by  a  shoe-lace  that 
had  been  noosed  around  the  neck  of  the  sainted 
dramatist.  Carey  had  always  been  mad  about  Shake- 
speare. Whatever  other  books  came  and  went,  on 
his  travels,  his  volume  of  Shakespeare  persisted. 
He  had  read  everything  about  Shakespeare  that 
he  could  find — about  his  works,  about  his  life,  about 
his  times.  He  was  already,  unconsciously,  an 
Elizabethan  expert,  but  the  only  fruits  of  his  study, 
as  yet,  were  several  blank-verse  tragedies  that  were 
useless  imitations  of  the  sound  of  Shakespeare  with 
the  sense  omitted. 

So,  with  his  hand  in  his  hair,  frowning  and  biting 
his  lips,  he  continued  to  scribble  at  his  newspaper 
article,  glancing  over  his  shoulder  at  the  girl,  now 

[20] 


OWEN    CAREY 


and  then,  absent-mindedly.  It  was  after  midnight 
when  he  turned  to  give  her  such  a  glance  and  found 
her  staring  at  him,  wide  awake. 

9 

He  put  down  his  pencil  at  once.  "Would  you 
like  me  to  warm  your  milk?"  he  asked. 

She  rose  on  her  elbow,  evidently  frightened,  and 
looked  down  at  the  towel  on  her  feet. 

He  said,  to  reassure  kher,  "I'll  see  that  you  get 
back  safely,  as  soon  as  you  feel  better." 

She  asked,  hoarsely,  "How  did  I  get  in  here?" 

"Don't  you  remember?  You  told  me  you  were 
hungry,"  he  said.  "You  couldn't  walk  to  a  res- 
taurant, so  I  brought  you  here.  I  guess  you 
fainted." 

She  blinked  at  him  in  a  bewildered  daze.  She 
demanded,  "Why  did  you  tie  my  feet?" 

"Your  feet?"  he  asked.  "Oh!  They  aren't 
tied.  I  took  off  your  shoes  and  stockings  because 
they  were  wet,  and  wrapped  your  feet  in  a  towel  to 
warm  them.  Try  some  of  this  ham.  It's  generally 
pretty  good." 

He  poured  her  a  cup  of  milk  and  made  her  a 
sandwich  of  the  ham  and  two  slices  of  bread  while 
he  talked.  "Don't  you  remember  drinking  a  cup 
of  milk  and  eating  something?" 

She  shook  her  head,  watching  his  hands  in  silence, 
sitting  up  against  the  wall  with  her  feet  drawn  up 
under  the  overcoat. 

[211 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


"Don't  you  remember  me  helping  you  out  of 
your  wet  things?" 

She  did  not  answer. 

He  gave  her  the  sandwich  and  she  took  it  in 
trembling,  numb-red  fingers  eagerly.  He  began  to 
make  her  another. 

She  swallowed  the  food  in  gulps,  half  masticated, 
because  she  was  either  too  weak  or  too  hungry  to 
chew  it.  "Where  am  I?"  she  asked,  in  a  thick 
whisper. 

He  told  her.  "You're  all  right,"  he  said.  "Now 
don't  worry.  I'll  see  that  you  get  back  safely, 
as  soon  as  you  feel  able  to  walk.  Is  it  far  to  your 
— to  where  you  live?" 

She  did  not  reply.  He  gave  her  the  cup  of  milk, 
and  she  looked  up  at  him  briefly,  but  her  eyes  told 
him  nothing.  She  drank  the  milk  as  if  her  mouth 
demanded  it  but  her  mind  was  not  interested  in 
the  matter. 

"I  don't  live  anywhere,"  she  said,  at  last. 

He  accepted  that  as  an  evasion.  "Where  do  you 
—work?" 

She  took  the  second  sandwich,  raised  it  to  her 
lips,  and  stopped  with  her  head  drooped.  "I  don't 
work.  I  can't  get  work."  Her  voice  broke.  "That's 
what's  the  matter."  The  sandwich  fell  to  her  lap. 
She  fumbled  at  it  blindly,  trying  to  pick  it  up  again. 
He  saw  that  it  was  tears  that  had  blinded  her.  She 
was  crying. 

"Oh,"  he  said. 

122] 


OWEN    CAREY 


And,  to  tell  the  truth,  he  was  suddenly  impatient 
with  her — as  impatient  as  an  old  convict  when  the 
quiet  of  his  cell  is  disturbed  by  the  inevitable 
tragedy  and  useless  despair  of  a  new-comer.  He 
had  received  her  as  a  girl  of  the  streets,  a  fellow 
life-timer  in  that  underworld  to  which  he  had  re- 
signed himself,  working  and  writing  with  no  am- 
bition to  escape,  but  merely  to  obtain  food  and  a 
bed.  He  had  helped  her,  in  the  expectation  that 
as  soon  as  she  had  been  fed  and  warmed  she  would 
go  off  to  serve  her  own  sentence  without  troubling 
him  further.  But  this  weeping  helplessness! 

He  began  to  question  her,  sitting  in  his  chair, 
his  hands  thrust  into  his  trousers  pockets,  his  legs 
stretched  out  before  him,  his  eyes  on  his  wet  feet. 
Where  had  she  come  from?  Why  didn't  she  go 
back?  WThat  had  she  been  working  at  ?Jt  Hadn't 
she  any  relatives  to  help  her? 

And  the  girl,  aware  of  his  change  of  voice,  began 
to  defend  herself,  to  explain  her  willingness  to  do 
anything — anything — and,  finally,  to  uncover,  ab- 
jectly, the  whole  lacerating  story  of  her  misfort- 
unes, her  struggles,  the  injustices  that  had  been 
done  her,  the  ignominy,  the  misery,  the  suffering, 
the  shame.  It  was  a  common  enough  story.  There 
was  nothing  new  in  it  to  Carey.  He  listened  as 
wearily  as  a  physician  hearing  of  pain.  ,  And  the 
girl  kept  sobbing,  at  the  end  of  each  successive 
chapter  of  her  degradation:  "It  was  worse  than  the 
life  of  a  dog."  And,  "If  I'd  been  a  dog  he'd  have 

3  [23] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


treated  me  better!"  And,  "If  I'd  been  a  dog  on 
the  streets,  some  one — some  one  would  have  helped 
me — fed  me — " 

Life  had  taken  her — young,  pretty,  proud,  sen- 
sitive, ignorant — and  it  had  betrayed  her  ignorance, 
sold  her  prettiness,  cheated  her  youth,  beaten  down 
her  pride,  and  stripped  and  tortured  the  raw  nerves 
of  her  sensitiveness.  She  told  him  of  it,  as  if  it 
were  being  wrung  out  of  her  on  a  rack,  in  paroxysms 
of  sobbing,  in  hoarse  and  shamed  whispers,  in  dull, 
exhausted  tones  of  desperation.  He  hunched  for- 
ward in  his  chair,  his  elbows  on  his  knees,  his  head 
in  his  hands.  What  was  the  use?  He  knew  it.  He 
knew  it  all.  The  world  was  full  of  it.  It  only  sick- 
ened the  heart  to  hear  it.  He  couldn't  live  and 
think  of  these  things. 

She  was  silent  at  last.  He  heard  her  moving, 
as  if  she  were  preparing  to  go.  "Well,"  he  said, 
frowning  at  the  floor,  "I  don't  know  what  I  can 
do."  And  then  he  heard  her  near  him.  She  whined. 
And,  dropping  his  hands,  he  saw  that  she  was  on 
all-fours  at  his  side,  panting  up  at  him  ingratiat- 
ingly, with  her  tongue  out. 

He  sprang  up.  "Don't!"  he  cried.  "Don't  do 
that!"  He  tried  to  raise  her  to  her  feet.  She  licked 
his  hand. 

"Listen,"  he  pleaded.  "You'll  be  all  right.  I'll 
help  you.  I  can  make  enough  for  two — until  you 
get  something.  You'll  be — " 

Her  eyes  were  the  dumb,  devoted,  appealing 

[24] 


OWEN    CAREY 


eyes  of  an  eager  and  willing  animal  that  could  not 
understand  a  word  lie  said. 

He  carried  her  back  to  the  bed1,  but  he  could 
not  make  her  lie  on  the  pillow.  She  curled  up  on 
her  side,  her  knees  drawn  up,  her  hands  closed  like 
paws,  her  head  down,  blinking  at  him,  shivering, 
and  whining  gratefully  when  he  touched  her. 

He  began  to  walk  up  and  down  the  room. 

10 

He  was  not  ignorant  enough  to  suppose  that  she 
had  merely  gone  insane.  He  was  sufficiently  ac- 
quainted with  the  theories  of  morbid  psychology 
to  understand  that  in  her  hysterical  state  she  had, 
so  to  speak,  hypnotized  herself  with  the  recurring 
thought,  "If  I  had  been  a  dog!"  until  she  imagined 
that  she  had  become  one.  Or,  to  use  the  fashion- 
able idiom  of  our  Freudian  day,  in  her  need  to 
escape  from  the  killing  worries  of  her  shame  and 
destitution  she  had  taken  refuge  in  a  loss  of  identity 
and  become  a  dog  subconsciously. 

All  of  that  did  not  help  Carey.  What  was  he 
to  do?  He  could  call  a  policeman  and  send  her  on 
her  way  to  the  psychopathic  ward  in  Bellevue  and 
thence  to  the  lunatic-asylum.  But  if  she  had  really 
been  a  dog  would  he  turn  her  out?  He  had  let  his 
mother  die  in  an  asylum.  (Or  so  he  put  it  to  him- 
self. He  had  not  known  of  it  till  after  she  was 
dead.)  And  the  thought  had  been,  for  years,  a  horror 
and  a  remorse  to  him.  He  could  not  do  it  again. 

[25] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  sat  down  on  the  side  of  the  bed  and  began  to 
talk  to  her.  He  assured  her  that  he  would  help 
her;  that  he  would  take  care  of  her;  that  he  would 
fix  the  room,  some  way,  so  that  they  might  both 
live  in  it;  or  he  would  rent  two  rooms  somewhere, 
and  she  could  work  for  him,  or  pass  as  his  sister, 
or  whatever  else  she  pleased. 

She  listened,  watching  his  lips,  smiling  with  that 
open-mouthed  panting,  and  evidently  hearing  noth- 
ing. He  gave  it  up  at  last  and  made  her  comfort- 
able between  the  blankets,  and  went  back  to  his 
seat  at  his  table  to  think  it  over.  He  rolled  a 
misered  cigarette  and  lit  it,  but  it  did  not  help 
him.  He  allowed  himself,  in  these  days,  ten  cents 
a  week  for  tobacco.  He  fell  asleep,  with  his  head 
on  his  arms,  and  when  he  awoke,  hours  later,  he 
found  her  curled  up  on  the  floor  at  his  feet. 

He  took  her  back  to  the  bed  and  made  a  sort  of 
sleeping-bag  of  the  blankets  by  pinning  them  to- 
gether with  safety-pins;  and  he  pinned  her  into 
this,  and  tied  her  down  with  the  line  on  which  he 
dried  his  washing.  There  was  a  bathroom  opening 
from  the  hall,  and  he  shut  himself  in  there,  with 
his  pillow,  intending  to  sleep  on  the  floor,  but  she 
whined  so — like  a  dog  locked  in  alone — that  he 
came  back  and  lay  on  the  floor  above  her  bed,  with 
his  feet  to  the  oil-heater. 

His  problem,  as  he  saw  it,  was  this:  The  girl's 
mind  had  divided  against  itself  under  the  stress  of 
revolting  ill  usage;  if  he  sheltered  her  and  protected 

[26] 


OWEN    CAREY 


her  for  a  while  she  would  probably  return  to  a 
normal  condition.  What  he  needed  was  two  or 
three  rooms  in  which  she  could  have  privacy,  and 
quiet,  and  housework  to  occupy  her.  It  would  not 
cost  much.  He  could  earn  more  if  he  worked 
harder.  He  had  done  it  before. 

He  had  done  it  when  he  first  learned  that  his 
mother  was  dead.  In  a  fit  of  repentance  he  had 
begun  to  work  and  save,  so  that  he  might  be  able 
to  take  her  from  whatever  pauper's  grave  she  had 
been  buried  in  and  put  up  some  sort  of  tombstone 
for  her  in  a  decent  cemetery.  He  had  saved  a 
hundred  dollars,  and  then  he  had  been  balked  by 
the  difficulty  of  writing,  as  a  stranger,  or  anony- 
mously, to  the  asylum — or  where  else? — to  have 
the  thing  done  for  him.  And,  being  the  sort  of 
person  whom  practical  difficulties  appal,  he  had 
continued  living  with  the  intention  of  doing  what 
he  never  made  any  attempt  to  do.  The  money  was 
still  in  a  Chicago  bank,  untouched,  waiting.  Well, 
he  could  make  a  vicarious  reparation  to  his  mother 
by  using  the  hundred  dollars  to  rescue  this  girl 
from  his  mother's  fate.  A  hundred  dollars,  with 
what  he  could  earn,  would  carry  them  for  a  year 
at  least.  He  fell  asleep,  easy  in  his  mind. 

11 

And  he  awoke,  next  morning,  to  the  responsi- 
bilities and  the  way  of  life  that  made  him  and  his 
novels  what  they  are. 

[271 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


She  seemed,  at  first,  almost  rational  when  she 
opened  her  eyes  to  find  him  cooking  their  breakfast 
of  oatmeal  and  coffee;  and  she  went,  at  his  direc- 
tion, to  wash  and  dress  herself  in  the  bathroom, 
sanely  enough.  But  her  silence  when  he  talked  to 
her  was  not  normal;  and  whenever  he  caught  her 
eye  it  was  frightened  and  wavering,  as  if  she  were 
always  on  the  edge  of  her  obsession;  and  once, 
when  he  touched  her  hand,  in  passing  her  a  second 
cup  of  coffee,  her  lips  trembled,  her  teeth  chattered, 
and  she  began  to  pant.  He  pretended  not  to  notice, 
and  the  attack  passed;  but  that  was  the  first  in- 
dication of  what  afterward  became  sufficiently  plain 
to  him,  namely,  that  her  delusion  was  partly  due  to 
what  the  psychologists  would  call  her  "subcon- 
scious desire"  to  have  her  relations  with  him  the 
relations  of  a  dog  to  its  master.  It  was  not  only 
the  world  that  she  feared;  she  feared  him,  too. 
And  he  was  peculiar  enough  to  be  relieved,  at  last, 
to  find  it  so.  He  did  not  want  a  woman  on  his 
hands.  He  would  have  much  preferred  a  dog. 

He  told  her  what  he  was  going  to  do,  about  rent- 
ing a  small  flat;  and  he  set  about  doing  it.  He 
got  his  money  from  Chicago  without  any  difficulty, 
and  he  found  two  rooms  in  a  house  on  One  Hundred 
and  Tenth  Street  (going  as  far  up-town  as  possible 
in  order  to  take  her  away  from  the  scene  of  her 
sufferings),  and  he  was  able  to  rent  the  two  rooms 
for  fifteen  dollars  a  month  because  they  were  almost 
uninhabitable.  They  were  in  the  basement  of  a 

[28] 


OWEN    CAREY 


private  house  that  had  been  converted  into  "studio 
apartments"  by  the  owner,  an  eccentric  woman  of 
artistic  tastes  who  proved,  on  nearer  acquaintance,' 
to  be  a  "Peruna  fiend."  And  the  rooms  were 
almost  uninhabitable  not  only  because  they  were 
damp,  but  because  the  landlady  was  a  pest.  The 
important  thing  about  them  was  this:  :  They  had 
been  made  into  a  sort  of  Dutch  cellar  with  a  red- 
tiled  floor,  half -timbered  walls,  beamed  ceilings, 
burnt-umber  woodwork,  an  open  fireplace,  and 
semi-opaque  windows  of  leaded  panes,  sunken  below 
the  street  level.  They  had  evidently  been  a  base- 
ment dining-room  and  kitchen  when  the  house  was 
private.  Carey  took  them  for  a  reason  of  which 
he  was,  I  think,  unaware;  they  did  not  look  like 
modern  rooms  in  New  York  City,  and  they  would 
be  a  complete  change  of  background  for  the  girl. 

He  moved  his  belongings  himself,  making  a  half- 
dozen  trips  on  the  Elevated  railroad  with  his  suit- 
case full,  and  abandoning  his  cot  and  his  table 
because  it  would  be  cheaper  to  buy  new  ones  than 
to  pay  cartage  on  the  old.  The  rear  room — the 
kitchen,  with  a  gas-stove  and  a  sink — he  furnished 
for  the  girl,  since  it  was  heated  by  the  house  furnace, 
which  intruded  its  warm  back  through  the  side 
wall.  He  bought  second-hand  furniture  and  helped 
install  it  himself;  and  he  avoided  the  curiosity  of 
the  landlady  by  refusing  to  answer  her  when  she 
knocked  on  his  door. 

He  brought  the  girl  up  after  midnight.     They 

[29] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


settled  down  in  comfortable  secrecy,  as  remote  as 
if  they  had  been  cloistered  in  a  crypt.  And  thus 
began  what  was  surely  the  oddest  romance  in  the 
history  of  American,  letters. 


She  seemed  quietly  contented,  cooking  and  wash- 
ing and  sweeping  and  sewing  for  him.  She  never 
ventured  out;  she  bolted  the  door  on  the  inside 
when  he  left,  and  she  opened  it  to  no  voice  but  his. 
The  landlady,  baffled,  waylaid  him  in  the  hall  with 
questions.  He  replied:  "We're  peculiar.  We  write, 
you  understand.  As  long  as  we  pay  our  rent  you'll 
kindly  leave  us  alone.  We're  busy  and  we  don't 
want  to  be  disturbed.  For  the  future,  as  far  as 
you're  concerned,  we're  deaf  and  dumb."  And 
when  she  found  that  they  did  pay  their  rent,  and 
did  not  complain  of  the  rain  that  came  in  under 
the  windows  and  gathered  in  pools  on  the  tiled 
floor,  she  left  them  to  their  privacy  undisturbed. 
She  would  not  have  cared  if  they  had  been  a  pair 
of  outlaws  in  hiding;  she  was  out  of  sympathy 
with  the  police  and  the  city  government;  her  life 
was  an  endless  quarrel  with  the  authorities  about  the 
fire  laws,  the  building  laws,  the  tenement-house 
laws,  and  the  regulations  of  the  Board  of  Health  —  . 
all  of  which  her  house  violated. 

For  the  first  month  Carey  and  the  girl  lived  in 
an  atmosphere  of  accepted  silence.  He  talked  to 
her  no  more  than  he  might  have  talked  to  a  ser- 

[30] 


OWEN    CAREY 


vant  in  similar  circumstances.  He  brought  in  food 
for  her  to  cook.  He  bought  her  a  dress,  which  she 
made  over.  He  got  her  sewing  materials  when  she 
asked  for  them,  and  she  made  herself  underclothes 
and  mended  his.  He  did  not  ask  her  any  ques- 
tions about  herself.  He  accepted  her  dumb  and 
doglike  fidelity  without  comment.  She  ate  her 
food  in  the  kitchen — which  he  never  entered, 
although  the  door  was  never  closed  between  them. 
She  served  him  his  meals  on  his  work-table,  and 
he  took  them  absent-mindedly,  reading  or  even 
writing  between  bites.  He  noticed  a  gradual  im- 
provement in  her  appearance,  but  he  did  not  re- 
mark it. 

One  evening,  as  he  worked,  he  heard  her  hum- 
ming an  air  to  herself,  over  her  ironing,  in  the 
kitchen,  and  he  listened,  smiling,  but  he  did  not 
speak.  He  discovered  that  she  was  reading  his 
books  in  his  absence,  and  he  began  to  buy  novels 
for  her — Scott  and  Dumas  and  historical  fiction, 
chiefly,  because  he  was  afraid  that  modern  litera- 
ture might  affect  her  adversely.  He  worked  very 
late,  one  night,  on  a  story  that  he  had  picked  up 
from  a  derelict  in  the  Mills  House;  and  when  he 
returned,  next  day,  from  an  afternoon  in  the  Astor 
Library  he  found  that  she  had  copied  out  his  manu- 
script for  him  in  a  clear,  girlish  handwriting.  He 
thanked  her  for  it,  as  matter-of-fact  as  possible, 
but  he  was  worried.  The  story  was  not  cheerful; 
it  was  taken  from  the  low  life  on  which  it  was  not 

[31] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


good  for  her  mind  to  dwell.  He  had  not  the  heart 
to  tell  her  not  to  touch  his  manuscripts,  since  she 
had  copied  this  one  to  help  him.  So  he  undertook 
to  write  something  that  it  should  not  depress  her 
to  read. 

Hence  Fair  Anne  Hathaway. 

He  began  it  as  a  short  story,  in  the  intervals  of 
his  newspaper  work,  but  it  grew  into  a  novelette, 
and  then  into  a  "three-decker,"  designed  to  carry 
her,  as  its  sole  passenger,  to  "the  Islands  of  the 
Blest."  When  she  had  copied  out  the  first  three 
chapters,  bit  by  bit,  as  he  wrote  them,  she  asked 
him,  timorously,  "What  happened  then?"  And 
thereafter  he  talked  it  over  with  her  in  advance, 
inventing  it  for  her,  and  making  it  meet  her  expec- 
tations when  she  voiced  any. 

It  was,  for  her,  a  complete  escape  from  reality. 
And  that,  no  doubt,  was  the  secret  of  its  success 
with  the  public — the  great  public  who  read  in  order 
to  get  away  from  themselves  and  their  lives.  When 
Francis  Hackett,  in  The  New  Republic,  lately  ridi- 
culed Fair  Anne  Hathaway  and  its  successors  in 
an  article  on  "The  Literature  of  Escape"  he  hit 
the  secret  nail  on  the  head,  blindfold,  and  in  the 
dark.  And  in  pointing  out  the  connection  between 
the  success  of  such  books  and  Jung's  theory  of  man- 
kind's "escape  into  the  dream"  he  was  not  only 
analyzing  a  tendency  of  the  American  public;  he 
was  psychoanalyzing  the  disorder  of  Carey's  first 
reader. 

[32] 


OWEN    CAREY 


Carey  wrote  for  her  with  a  simplicity  of  expres- 
sion that  was  sweetly  reasonable  and  altogether 
charming — a  style  that  conveyed  romance  to  the 
public  taste,  without  effort,  through  a  soda- 
fountain  straw.  He  found  that  she  had  identified 
herself  with  his  heroine;  so  he  fed  her  up,  curatively, 
in  the  person  of  that  heroine,  with  the  loyalty  and 
devotion  of  adoring  heroes;  and  never  had  the 
feminine  reader  found  a  happier  appeal  to  her  pride 
of  sex.  And  yet  the  heroine  was  a  Shakespearian 
woman — a  true  masculine  ideal — brave,  wise,  witty, 
self-sacrificing,  chaste,  and  proudly  faithful  to  her 
lord;  and  love's  young  dreamers  fairly  drooled 
over  her.  The  girl  was  interested  in  every  detail 
of  the  Elizabethan  life  in  Stratford-on-Avon,  and 
Carey  made  it  vivid,  with  the  help  of  the  Astor 
Library,  if  he  did  not  try  to  make  it  real.  It 
glowed  with  the  light  that  never  was.  The  whole 
story  had  the  "uplift"  that  is  the  substance  of 
things  hoped  for  and  the  evidence  of  things  unseen. 
It  was  a  school-girFs  dream.  It  came  to  the  pub- 
lishers in  her  handwriting,  and  started  the  first 
report  that  "Owen  Carey'*  was  a  woman.  And 
when  Carey  called  at  the  publishers'  office,  in  re- 
sponse to  a  letter  of  acceptance,  they  were  as  as- 
tonished as  if  Marie  Corelli  had  turned  out  to  be 
G.  K.  Chesterton. 

He  had  grown  plump  on  the  girl's  cooking.  She 
kept  his  clothes  pressed  and  brushed  and  mended. 
She  had  made  him  buy  a  new  gray  suit  for  the  oc- 

[33] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


casion.  He  asked,  "Why  gray?"  She  replied,  fur- 
tively, "He — he  always  wore  black.'*  And  Carey 
never  wore  anything  but  gray  afterward. 

He  had  the  gruff  manner  with  which  so  many 
men  of  diffidence  protect  themselves  in  strange 
approaches.  He  was  much  more  keen  for  money 
in  advance  and  steep  royalties  than  was  seemly 
in  the  author  of  Fair  Anne  Hathaway.  He  drove  a 
good  bargain,  because  the  publishers  were  certain 
that  they  had  found  a  best-seller.  And  they  were 
right. 

The  book  was  an  immediate  success.  Carey  took 
thirty  thousand  dollars  out  of  it  in  the  first  year, 
and  he  put  the  money  by  for  her,  in  case  anything 
should  happen  to  him.  They  rented  the  apartment 
above  their  cellar  and  built  an  inner  staircase  to 
connect  the  two  floors.  It  was  not  until  after  the 
popularity  of  The  Queen's  Quest  that  they  bought 
the  whole  house  to  get  rid  of  the  landlady.  He  fur- 
nished the  rooms  in  antiques  and  surrounded  the 
girl  with  the  interior  setting  of  a  Shakespearian 
comedy  mounted  by  a  stage  realist.  He  named  her 
"Rosalind,"  partly  in  play,  but  also  in  order  to  dis- 
connect her  from  her  past.  Her  real  name  he  did 
not  know.  He  had  never  asked  it.  He  began  to 
collect  the  library  of  Elizabethan  and  medieval 
literature  upon  which  he  drew  so  copiously  for  his 
later  novels.  She  learned  to  use  the  typewriter; 
and  she  was,  at  once,  his  secretary,  his  housekeeper, 
his  valet,  and  his  cook. 

[34] 


OWEN    CAREY 


Their  relations  remained  what  they  had  been 
in  the  beginning.  Carey  made  the  mistake  of  being 
demonstrative  toward  her  only  once — when  he 
bought  her  an  old  amber  necklace  with  his  first 
check  from  Fair  Anne  Hathaway — and  she  recoiled 
from  his  attempted  caress  into  a  morbid  seizure  of 
half-idiotic  animal  abjectness.  He  could  not  reach 
the  source  of  this  morbidity.  He  did  not  know 
how.  He  had  to  wait.  And  he  waited  nearly  two 
years  before  he  found  his  solution. 

13 

Then,  one  summer  night,  when  they  were  re- 
turning from  a  walk  in  Central  Park — for  by  this 
time  he  had  persuaded  her  to  come  out  with  him 
occasionally,  for  a  little  exercise,  after  dark — a 
furtive-looking  man  passed  and  stared  at  her,  as 
they  crossed  Columbus  Avenue  on  the  way  home; 
and  she  clutched  at  Carey's  arm,  making  a  noise  in 
her  throat  as  if  she  were  strangling. 

Carey  caught  her.  "What's  the  matter?  What 
is  it?" 

She  gasped,  "It's  him!"  and  tried  to  run. 

Carey  held  her  back.  "Wait  a  minute.  Go  slow. 
Who  is  it?" 

But  she  could  only  whisper:  "It's  him!  It's  him!" 

The  man  had  stopped  in  the  street  and  stood 
watching  them. 

"Good!"  Carey  said.  "I've  been  hoping  he'd 
turn  up.  Go  slow.  If  it's  he — he'll  follow  us." 

[Ml 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  took  her  arm,  and  she  stumbled  along  with 
him,  trembling  against  him,  breathing  heavily. 
The  man,  as  Carey  had  hoped,  came  sneaking  after 
them  at  a  distance. 

Carey  took  her  up  then*  steps  to  the  front  door, 
and  descended  with  her,  inside,  to  the  basement, 
switching  on  all  the  lights.  He  left  her  in  the  kitch- 
en and  went  out  noiselessly  to  the  [basement  door. 
The  man  was  standing  on  the  steps,  looking  up  at 
the  street  number.  Carey  came  quietly  behind 
him.  "She  wants  to  see  you,*'  he  said. 

The  man  wheeled,  startled.  Carey  was  block- 
ing his  escape.  "Who?"  he  asked,  temporizing. 
"Mary?" 

"Yes,"  Carey  answered.  "Mary.  Go  right  in." 
(So  her  name  was  Mary!) 

"Well,"  the  fellow  said,  in  a  wheezy  voice,  "this 
's  a  su'prise.  I  wasn't  sure  it  was  her." 

"It's  her,"  Carey  waved  him  on.  "She  wants 
to  see  you — inside." 

The  man  looked  him  over,  hesitated,  said,  "Well, 
tha's  all  right,  too,"  and  entered,  slouching. 

Carey  pointed  him  the  way  down  to  the  basement, 
directed  him  to  the  Dutch  dining-room,  and  fol- 
lowed in. 

"Mary!"  he  called.    "Come  here." 

She  came  from  the  kitchen.  And  standing  in  the 
doorway,  supporting  herself  with  one  hand  on  the 
door-jamb,  she  looked  across  the  room  at  the  man 
with  an  insane  and  helpless  horror. 

[36] 


OWEN    CAREY 


"Is  it?"  Carey  demanded.    "Is  it  he?" 

She  made  a  fumbling  gesture  as  if  either  plead- 
ingly or  defensively. 

The  man  put  back  his  rakish  derby  from  his 
forehead.  He  had  a  prison  hair-cut  and  a  prison 
pallor.  He  bared  his  yellow  teeth  in  an  evil  grin 
and  said:  "Sure,  it's  me.  Eh,  Mary?  You're 
lookin'  swell!" 

Carey  slammed  the  door  and  shot  the  bolt. 

The  man  turned  instantly,  crouching,  his  hand  at 
his  hip  pocket.  Before  he  could  draw  his  weapon, 
Carey  had  sprung  at  him,  open-handed,  from  the 
door-step;  and  they  fell,  grappling. 

Carey  was  no  featherweight.  He  was  still  tough 
from  the  hardships  of  his  youth.  He  was  blind  with 
hatred.  And  the  touch  of  the  struggling  malevolent 
flesh  under  his  hands  put  him  into  the  sort  of  frenzy 
of  murderous  and  loathsome  revulsion  that  he  might 
have  felt  in  crushing  a  rat  bare-handed.  He  struck 
and  tore  and  strangled  frantically;  and  the  man, 
caught  with  one  arm  beneath  him  and  still  fighting 
to  get  out  his  revolver,  was  unable  to  protect  him- 
self from  such  an  assault.  When  he  got  the  weapon 
free  he  was  blinded  with  his  own  bleeding,  and 
Carey  wrenched  the  revolver  from  him  and  beat 
him  on  the  head  with  it.  He  went  limp.  Carey 
was  kneeling  on  his  chest,  throttling  the  life  out 
of  him,  when  the  lack  of  resistance  and  the  choking 
under  his  hands  brought  him  to  his  senses.  For 
one  horrified  moment  he  thought  he  had  killed. 

[371 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


Then  the  battered  wreck  under  him  drew  a  long 
gurgle  of  breath  that  sounded  like  water  in  a  waste- 
pipe.  Carey  staggered  to  his  feet.  He  took  up 
the  revolver  and  cocked  it. 

"Now,  you  dog,"  he  said,  "get  up!" 

The  man  rolled  over,  writhing  painfully. 

"Come  here,  Mary,"  he  ordered. 

She  was  standing  erect  in  the  doorway,  her 
nostrils  dilated,  her  hands  clenched.  She  came 
forward  slowly  in  that  attitude. 

"This  is  your  dog,"  he  said.  "Do  you  under- 
stand?" 

She  nodded,  without  taking  her  eyes  from  the 
creature  on  the  floor. 

"Good!    Shall  I  shoot  him?" 

The  man  undoubtedly  thought  he  had  to  do  with 
a  maniac.  Nothing  else  could  explain  the  villain- 
ous ferocity  of  the  attack.  He  began  to  whimper 
and  snuffle  in  plaintive  oaths  and  pleadings,  smear- 
ing his  bleeding  face  with  his  torn  hands. 

"Shall  I  kiU  him?" 

Mary  shook  her  head,  wide-eyed. 

"Come  closer,"  Carey  ordered. 

She  came. 

"Now,"  he  said  to  the  man,  "roll  over  and  lick 
her  boots.  Do  it,  you  hound,  or  I'll  tear  the  heart 
out  of  you!"  With  a  cruelty  that  he  would  never 
have  used  to  a  dog  Carey  turned  him  over  with 
the  side  of  his  foot.  "On  all-fours,"  he  ordered. 
"Do  it!" 

[38] 


OWEN    CAREY 


He  did  it — after  a  fashion.  It  was  not  a  pretty 
scene. 

"There!"  Carey  said.  "Good!  Now!  This  is 
your  dog,  Mary.  Understand?  See  him.  Your 
dog.  Wipe  your  feet  on  him.  Do  it !" 

She  did  it — with  the  expression  of  a  child  who 
is  being  encouraged  to  touch  a  cowed  animal  that 
she  has  been  >afraid  of. 

"Good!    Now  kick  him!" 

She  shook  her  head.  She  said,  slowly,  "Let 
him  go." 

Carey  looked  at  her.  There  was  no  fear  of  any 
one  in  her  face.  "Fine!"  he  said.  "Here,  you  cur, 
crawl  back  to  that  door!  Go  on!  Do  it!  Slowly! 
Grovel.  Whine  like  the  cur  you  are.  Whine,  or 
I'll  shoot  the  ears  off  you.  Now!  If  I  ever  meet 
you  again,  I'll  kill  you  on  sight." 

He  threw  the  door  open.  The  man  crawled  out 
on  hands  and  knees.  Carey  kicked  the  hat  out 
after  him  and  slammed  the  door  shut. 

They  heard  him  stumbling  frantically  up  the 
outer  stairs. 

Carey  stood  waiting — an  unromantic  figure — his 
collar  torn  open,  his  face  scratched,  one  eye  be- 
ginning to  swell,  and  his  complexion  turning  a 
delicate  green  with  a  seasick  feeling  that  never 
afflicted  his  heroes  after  battle.  She  came  toward 
him  with  her  hands  out,  slowly,  stiffly,  tremulously 
confident,  smiling,  dry-lipped,  pale.  He  laid  the 
revolver  on  the  table  and  took  her  in  his  arms. 

4  [39] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


"There!"  he  said.  "Now!  Good!"  Then  suddenly, 
in  another  voice,  leaning  on  her  heavily,  he  added: 
"Get  me  something  to  drink — quick.  I'm  all  in." 
And  in  that  inelegant  manner  Mary  Carey  was 
reconciled  to  reality. 

14 

I  say  "Mary  Carey,"  for  he  dropped  the  "Rosa- 
lind"; and  though  he  married  her  under  the  name 
of  McGillicuddy  in  order  to  escape  publicity,  she 
is  known  as  Mary  Carey  to  the  few  friends  whom 
she  has  made — chiefly  at  summer  resorts — since 
she  has  gradually  emerged  from  her  seclusion. 

She  has  never  emerged  very  far.  She  is  too  busy. 
She  still  acts  as  her  husband's  secretary,  though  a 
trio  of  silent  Chinese  have  supplanted  her  as  house- 
maid, valet,  and  cook.  Carey  has  not  emerged  at 
all.  He  is,  for  one  thing,  too  happy  in  his  home. 
For  another,  he  is — Owen  Carey.  He  has  taken 
refuge  from  all  reality  in  his  romantic  art,  and  he 
devotes  himself  to  it  in  the  silence  of  a  Trappist 
monk.  How  any  one  ever  interested  him  in  the 
Authors'  League  I  cannot  imagine.  He  resigned 
from  the  executive  committee  as  soon  as  they 
began  to  talk  about  affiliating  with  the  American 
Federation  of  Labor. 

She  is  as  silent  as  he,  but  she  gives  much  more  the 
impression  of  being  a  personage  in  her  own  right. 
She  has  a  low-voiced  air  of  grave  young  placidity, 
and  she  is  slenderly  graceful  and  well-dressed,  with 

[40] 


OWEN    CAREY 


one  of  those  Madonna-like  faces  that  seem  to  show 
nothing  of  experience  but  its  increment  of  wisdom. 
You  could  never  imagine  her  starving  in  degrada- 
tion on  the  streets.  She  seems  born  to  be  the  suc- 
cessful wife  of  a  successful  author.  And  if  his  last 
novels  have  not  been  so  successful  as  his  earlier 
ones,  it  is,  I  think,  because  Mary  Carey  has  become 
so  interested  in  actualities  that  she  is  rather  spoiled 
as  an  inspirer  of  the  "literature  of  escape." 

Not  that  it  matters  to  either  of  them.  He  has 
saved  a  fortune.  And  she  has  an  independent 
annuity  of  her  own,  which  he  bought  for  her  with 
the  surplus  royalties  from  The  Queen's  Quest,  Sweet 
Rosalind,  With  Crash  of  Shield,  and  In  Cloth  of  Gold. 


FROM   THE   LIFE 

Jane  Shore 


JANE  SHORE 


SHORE,  Jane  (Frances  Martha  Wid- 
gen),  actress;  b.  Phila.,  Oct.  27,  1883; 
d.  Mathew  and  Martha  (Deprez)  W.J 
ed.  Leslie  Academy,  Phila.,  etc.  Made 
her  debut  in  "The  Level  of  Pity,"  1903; 
first  starred  in  "A  Woman's  Reason," 
1904;  later  starred  in  Thomas's  "A 
Man's  a  Man,"  1905-06;  Shaw's  "Sa- 
tan's Advocate,"  1906;  Barrie's  "A 
Window  in  Thrums,"  1907-09;  "Romeo 
and  Juliet,"  1910;  Charming  Pollock's 
"The  World,  the  Flesh  and  Little  Miss 
Montgomery,"  1911-12;  Galsworthy's 
"The  Quality  of  Mercy,"  1913;  Shake- 
spearian r&les  and  repertoire,  1914-16. 
Address:  Hoffman's  Theater,  New  York 
City.— Who's  Who. 


TT  is  not  easy  to  do  any  sort  of  truthful  portrait 
•*•  of  Jane  Shore.  We  are  all,  no  doubt,  different 
with  different  people,  and  at  different  times,  but 
Jane  Shore  is  wilfully  so,  particularly  when  she  sees 
that  she  is  being  watched.  It  is  difficult  to  choose 
any  incidents  from  her  life  that  seem  wholly  char- 
acteristic. And  it  is  impossible  to  find  any  brief, 
connected  series  of  events  that  gives  her  inclusively. 
The  best  that  one  can  do  is  to  offer  one's  portfolio 
of  pencil  studies  and  say:  "Glance  over  these. 
You  may  find  one  or  two  that  you'll  recognize." 
At  one  time  I  had  a  dozen  photographs  of  her 

[45] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


tacked  up  together  over  a  writing-desk;  and  in- 
variably the  stranger  would  say:  "Who  are  all  the 
good-looking  girls?  I  recognize  Jane  Shore,  but 
who  are  the  others?" 

Take,  for  example,  the  earliest  anecdote  about 
her  that  I  have.  It  is  the  story  of  how,  at  the  age 
of  six,  she  rode  her  pony  into  a  corner  drug-store 
and  demanded  of  the  soda-fountain  clerk  that  he 
serve  her  and  her  Shetland  with  ice-cream  soda. 
She  did  it  with  childish  seriousness,  and  the  young 
clerk  humored  her  by  pretending  to  water  the  pony 
with  fizzy  drink  while  she  had  her  glass  in  the  saddle. 
And  you  might  consider  the  incident  typical  of  her 
imperious  directness  and  unconventionality  if  there 
were  not  ground  for  suspicion  that  she  knew  ex- 
actly what  she  was  doing,  knew  that  the  clerk  would 
be  amused  by  it,  and  knew  that  the  story  would  be 
relished  by  her  parents. 

And  the  ground  for  this  suspicion  is  found  in  the 
following  consideration: 

Once,  when  she  was  no  more  than  eight,  she  was 
out  driving  with  her  father — behind  the  fastest 
and  most  vicious  of  the  young  horses  that  he  de- 
lighted to  fight  and  master — when  the  breeching 
of  the  harness  broke,  going  down  a  hill,  and  the 
frightened  animal,  being  butted  into  by  the  carriage, 
kicked  back  at  the  whiffletree,  broke  one  of  the 
shafts,  put  a  hoof  through  the  dashboard,  and  then 
bolted,  with  the  harness  breaking  anew  at  every 
plunge  and  the  hanging  shaft  prodding  him  on. 

[46] 


JANE    SHORE 


They  were  on  a  country  road  so  deeply  ditched  that 
they  could  not  turn  out  of  it  into  a  fence.  They 
were  approaching  a  bridge,  and  it  was  improbable 
that  they  would  be  able  to  cross  it  safely.  "Well, 
young  lady,"  her  father  said,  through  his  teeth, 
"I  think  we're  done."  She  clung  to  her  seat  in 
silence.  He  saw  a  shallower  part  of  the  ditch  ahead, 
where  there  was  an  open  gate  into  the  fields.  Fort- 
unately it  was  on  the  opposite  side  from  the  broken 
shaft.  He  took  a  single  rein  in  both  hands  and 
pulled  on  it  savagely.  The  horse  leaped  aside, 
the  carriage  swooped  into  the  ditch,  a  front  wheel 
dished  and  broke  at  the  hub,  and  they  overturned. 

They  were  saved  from  being  kicked  to  a  pulp 
because  the  tugs  broke  and  freed  the  horse.  When 
they  picked  themselves  up  from  the  mud,  the  girl, 
her  face  blazing  with  excitement,  cried:  "Daddy! 
Let's  do  it  again!" 

And  the  point  is  that  she  knew  what  she  was 
saying  and  said  it  partly  because  she  really  had  en- 
joyed the  excitement,  partly  to  reassure  his  anxiety 
about  her,  but  largely  for  what  you  might  call  the 
dramatic  effect.  This  she  has  admitted.  She  has 
admitted  that  by  some  duality  of  mind,  even  at  the 
age  of  eight,  and  in  such  a  moment,  she  was  capable 
of  a  theatricality. 

It  is  the  more  puzzling  because  she  was  evidently 
a  frank  and  natural  child.  She  was  not  precocious 
nor  self-conscious.  Nor  was  she  ever  paraded  in 
any  public  way  by  her  parents.  They  were  not 

[47] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


stage  people.  Far  from  it.  Her  real  name  is  Fanny 
Widgen.  Her  father  was  Mathew  Widgen,  a  Phila- 
delphia business  man,  a  rice  importer,  of  Quaker 
descent.  Her  mother  was  the  daughter  of  a  Cal- 
vinist  minister,  of  an  old  Huguenot  family. 
And  unless  you  blame  the  French  blood  of  a  great- 
grandmother,  there  is  no  inheritance  to  account 
for  temperament,  artistry,  and  the  stage. 


Jane  Shore  herself  gives  a  curious  explanation 
of  the  origin  of  her  career  —  more  curious  than 
credible.  She  says  that  just  before  her  birth  her 
mother  developed  an  unaccountable  passion  for 
the  theater;  and  the  staid  Mathew,  forced  to  humor 
her,  took  a  box  at  every  possible  performance  and 
sat  stonily  in  the  public  eye,  with  his  wife  concealed 
behind  him.  The  future  Juliet  was  all  but  born 
in  that  box.  After  her  birth  Mathew  Widgen's 
aversion  to  the  stage  —  as  one  of  the  open  gates  to 
hell  —  prevailed  again  in  his  family,  unopposed. 
And  when,  at  the  age  of  five,  young  Fanny  was 
found  standing  on  a  chair  in  front  of  a  mirror, 
whitening  her  face  with  flour,  it  was  with  horror 
that  her  mother  cried,  "I've  marked  her  for  the 
theater!" 

That  is  all  very  dramatic.  And  it  may  be  true, 
as  far  as  it  goes.  But  it  omits  to  mention  that  Mrs. 
Widgen  provided  her  daughter  with  lessons  in  sing- 
ing and  dancing  and  the  parlor  arts  of  water-color 


JANE    SHORE 


painting  and  piano-playing.  It  overlooks  the  en- 
couragement that  she  gave  her  child  in  the  imagi- 
native games  which  they  enjoyed  together,  secretly, 
in  the  attic — games  that  at  one  time  included  a 
miniature  stage  and  elaborate  costuming.  It  fails, 
in  short,  to  understand  what  is  quite  plain  in  Jane 
Shore's  recollection  of  her  parents — namely,  that 
her  mother  was  a  suppressed  personality,  kept  pallid 
in  the  shadow  of  her  husband's  righteous  domina- 
tion and  making  an  unconscious  revolt  in  the  per- 
son of  her  daughter.  If  she  "marked"  her  child 
for  the  theater,  she  did  it,  I  believe,  as  the  mother 
of  three  solemn  sons — and  a  prospective  fourth — 
oppressed  by  the  tight-mouthed  Mathew,  and  turn- 
ing involuntarily  to  the  light  and  romance  of  the 
stage  from  the  drab  respectability  of  her  smothered 
life.  To  understand  her  you  have  only  to  see  Jane 
Shore's  photographs  of  her  mother  and  her  father 
and  their  blank-windowed  white-brick  house  with 
its  black  metal  deer  on  either  side  of  its  entrance 
steps  and  the  metallic-looking  black  pines  surround- 
ing it.  Those  photographs  sufficiently  explain  why, 
as  long  as  Mrs.  Widgen  lived,  she  never  allowed  the 
girl  to  be  checked  in  any  natural  impulse  or  the  ex- 
pression of  it. 

It  happened — as  it  frequently  happens — that  the 
father  admired  a  spirit  in  his  daughter  which  he 
would  have  crushed  jealously  in  his  wife.  Fanny 
had  inherited  his  strength  of  will;  he  was  proud  of 
it  in  her;  and  she  had  her  way  with  him.  In  fact, 

[49] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


she  did  as  she  pleased  with  them  all,  including  her 
horse-faced  brothers,  whom  she  named  after  the 
three  bears  of  the  fairy-tale.  She  began  life  with 
the  dominating  spirit  of  privileged  youth,  and  it 
carried  her  far. 

Her  mother's  death,  when  she  was  only  fifteen, 
had  an  abnormal  effect  on  her.  It  put  a  shadow 
permanently  into  the  background  of  her  mind, 
established  a  peculiar  tragic  hinterland  of  thought 
into  which  Jane  Shore  retires  at  her  most  lively 
moments,  unaccountably,  with  an  air  of  almost 
cynical  detachment  when  you  would  least  expect 
it.  But  that  came  later.  As  the  immediate  result 
of  her  mother's  death  she  was  sent  away  from  home, 
to  the  Misses  Leslie's  Select  Boarding-school  for 
Young  Ladies.  There  she  remained  for  three  years, 
chiefly  distinguishing  herself  as  a  leader  in  various 
dormitory  escapades  and  in  the  school's  amateur 
theatricals,  in  which  she  generally  played  male 
parts  with  a  deep  voice  and  a  gallant  stride.  Her 
success  in  organizing  mischief  ended  by  the  Misses 
Leslie  demanding,  with  firm  politeness,  that  her 
father  take  her  home.  And  her  success  in  the  school 
theatricals  gave  her  the  idea  of  going  on  the  stage. 
When  her  father  received  her,  disgraced,  in  his 
library,  she  turned  the  flank  of  his  wrath  at  her 
expulsion — characteristically — by  announcing  that 
she  was  done  with  school,  anyway,  that  she  was 
going  to  be  an  actress. 

He  sat  grasping  the  arms  of  his  library  chair, 

[50] 


JANE    SHORE 


like  a  ruler  enthroned,  confident  of  his  authority. 
"Never,"  he  said.  "No  more  of  that.  You'll  take 
your  mother's  place  here — " 

"Dad,"  she  cut  in,  "you've  let  me  have  my  way 
too  long  to  start  bullying  me  now.  I'm  going  on 
the  stage." 

"Never!"  he  said,  with  a  gesture  of  finality. 
"Never!" 

She  folded  her  hands.  "If  you  wanted  to  do  it, 
nobody  in  the  world  could  stop  you.  And  I'm  like 
you" 

His  face  hardened  in  a  cold  fury.  "You'll  not 
disgrace  my  name!" 

"I'll  change  it,"  she  said,  cheerfully.  "I'm  going 
to  call  myself  'Jane  Shore.'* 

"Not  while  I  live!"  he  shouted.  "Not  while  I 
live!" 

"Well,"  she  said,  "y°u  ca11  spend  the  rest  of 
your  life  fighting  me,  if  you  want  to.  But  I'm 
going  to  do  it." 

3 

And,  of  course,  she  did  it.  She  took  her  mother's 
place  as  housekeeper  for  a  month,  and  during  that 
time  she  secretly  pawned  or  sold  everything  that 
could  be  removed  from  the  house  without  being 
missed.  She  put  in  her  own  purse  all  the  money 
that  she  could  get  for  the  household  expenses,  and 
she  paid  no  bills.  She  sent  her  trunk  unnoticed  to 
the  railroad  station,  with  the  aid  of  a  young  gar- 

[51] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


dener  who  was  her  slave;  and,  having  dressed  her- 
self for  a  drive,  she  took  her  satchel  in  her  dog- 
cart, drove  to  an  exchange  stables  where  she  was 
known,  sold  the  cart  and  her  little  mare  for  two 
hundred  dollars,  and  bought  her  ticket  for  New  York. 

That  night  she  settled  in  a  studio-room  on 
Twenty-third  Street,  with  a  former  classmate  who 
was  studying  music.  She  had  seven  hundred  dol- 
lars. She  had  left  her  father  the  pawn-tickets  and 
a  letter  addressed  to  "Dear  old  Daddy  kins'*  and 
signed  "Jane  Shore."  It  informed  him,  gaily,  that 
as  soon  as  her  money  ran  out  she  would  be  back 
for  more. 

She  had  chosen  the  name  of  "Jane  Shore"  be- 
cause she  had  read  Sir  Thomas  More's  description 
of  the  original  Jane  in  a  history  of  famous  court 
beauties — which  she  had  borrowed  from  a  school- 
mate whose  reading  was  secretly  adventurous — 
and  she  thought  that  the  description  fitted  her. 
So  it  did,  somewhat.  And,  at  least,  it  shows  what 
she  was  ambitious  to  be.  It  runs: 

Proper  she  was,  and  faire:  nothing  in  her  body  that  you 
would  have  changed,  but  if  you  would  have  wished  her  some- 
what higher.  Yet  delited  not  men  so  much  in  her  bewty  as 
in  her  pleasant  behaviour.  For  a  proper  wit  had  she  and  could 
both  rede  wel  and  write;  mery  in  company,  redy  and  quick 
of  aunswer,  neither  mute  nor  ful  of  bable;  sometimes  taunting 
without  displeasure  and  not  without  disport. 

Her  vitality,  her  will,  and  her  high  spirits  car- 
ried her  unwearied  through  the  obscure  hardships 

[52] 


JANE    SHORE 


of  her  first  four  years  of  struggle  as  a  chorus-girl, 
as  a  gay  young  widow  in  a  musical  comedy,  as 
an  ingenue  in  a  Washington  stock  company,  and 
finally  as  the  mother  of  a  kidnapped  child  in  a  vaude- 
ville act.  She  made  a  hit  in  the  last  by  virtue  of 
one  nerve-shattering  shrill  scream  with  which  she 
Hf ted  the  audience  from  their  seats  when  she  found 
that  her  baby  had  been  stolen.  She  was  then  en- 
gaged to  take  a  similar  part,  with  a  similar  scream, 
in  a  melodrama  by  an  author  whom  I  knew.  It 
was  his  first  accepted  play.  I  went  to  hear  him 
read  it  to  the  company,  on  the  stage  where  they 
were  to  rehearse;  and  I  was  struck  by  the  fact  that 
in  the  semicircle  of  actors  who  sat  around  him  only 
two  seemed  to  listen  to  the  play.  The  others  lis- 
tened to  the  speeches  of  then*  individual  parts, 
coming  forward  to  these  with  their  interest,  so  to 
speak,  like  children  to  receive  their  presents  from 
a  Christmas  tree,  and  examining  the  lines  that  they 
received  invidiously,  with  one  eye  always  on  what 
the  others  were  getting. 

The  two  who  seemed  to  be  hearing  the  play  as  a 
whole  were  a  little  girl,  who  was  evidently  to  take 
the  role  of  the  kidnapped  child,  and  a  young  woman 
in  a  dark  street  gown  who  listened  with  a  con- 
sistent interest,  her  eyes  always  on  the  reader. 
She  wore  a  sort  of  three-cornered  hat,  and  she  sat 
back  in  her  kitchen  chair,  one  arm  outstretched  to 
rest  her  hand  on  the  knob-handle  of  her  parasol 
in  the  attitude  of  a  cavalier  with  his  cane.  She 

[53] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


had  an  air  of  easy  alertness,  an  air  of  intelligence, 
an  air  of  personality.  Her  place  near  the  middle 
of  the  semicircle  indicated  that  she  had  only  a 
small  part  in  the  play,  for  the  principals  sat  at 
either  extremity,  near  the  footlights,  by  some  stage 
convention  of  precedence;  and  the  others  had  ar- 
ranged themselves  in  order  of  importance  in  the 
arc.  (The  star,  of  course,  was  not  present.)  She 
did  not  strike  me  as  remarkably  beautiful — until 
I  saw  her  properly  made  up,  in  the  glory  of  the 
pinks  and  ambers  of  the  foots.  But  there  was,  as 
Sir  Thomas  More  said,  "nothing  in  her  body  that 
you  would  have  changed,  but  if  you  had  wished 
her  somewhat  higher";  and  greater  height  would 
have  handicapped  her  in  her  beginnings  on  the 
stage,  where  the  men  are  rarely  tall  and  rarely 
willing  to  play  opposite  a  woman  who  dwarfs 
them. 

It  was  probably  her  hat  that  gave  me  the  feeling 
she  was  a  horsewoman;  and  this  impression  was 
confirmed  when  the  reading  was  finished  and  she 
rose  to  walk  about  the  stage  with  what  used  to  be 
called  a  "lissome"  carriage — a  supple- waisted  and 
firm-shouldered  bearing — that  obviously  came  from 
horseback-riding.  I  remarked  her  to  the  playwright, 
using  some  phrase  about  her  "carriage";  and  he 
repeated  it,  when  he  introduced  me  to  her,  as  an 
excuse  for  the  introduction.  "Yes,"  she  said,  re- 
garding us  gravely,  "it  got  me  my  start  in  the  pro- 
fession." 

[54] 


JANE    SHORE 


He  was  called  away  by  the  stage  director,  and  I 
remained  to  ask  her,  "How  was  that?" — being 
already  curious  about  her. 

She  replied,  demurely,  "I  sold  it  for  a  hundred 
dollars."  And  with  that  she  left  me,  puzzled. 

It  was  not  until  I  heard,  later,  of  her  selling  her 
dog-cart  to  leave  home  that  I  understood  the  pert 
creature  had  been  punning.  She  apologized  for  it, 
then,  by  explaining  that  she  had  been  nervous. 
"I  was  frightened  to  death,"  she  said.  "It  was  my 
first  engagement  with  a  regular  company,  and  I 
didn't  know  how  to  behave." 

I  do  not  believe  a  word  of  that.  I  do  not  believe 
that  she  was  ever  frightened  in  her  life. 

She  left  me,  as  I  said,  puzzled.  She  did  not  in- 
vite any  further  acquaintance,  and  I  did  not  seek 
the  invitation.  My  curiosity  about  her  was  lost, 
for  the  time,  in  a  curiosity  about  the  stage  condi- 
tions that  appeared  to  my  astonished  apprehension 
as  the  rehearsals  progressed.  And  since  those  con- 
ditions have  largely  helped  to  make  Jane  Shore 
what  she  is,  I  should  like  to  indicate  them  briefly. 

4 

In  the  first  place,  I  had  supposed  that  the  re- 
hearsal of  a  play,  by  a  stage  director  and  his  com- 
pany, was  like  the  rehearsal  of  a  musical  composi- 
tion by  an  orchestra  and  its  conductor.  I  expected 
to  hear  it  studied,  practised,  faithfully  interpreted. 
I  imagined  that  the  author  would  rise  at  impatient 

5  [55] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


intervals  and  say:  "No,  no.  That  isn't  what  I 
meant.  Take  it  this  way." 

Nothing  of  the  sort.  Quite  the  opposite.  The 
author  proved  to  be  as  little  important  at  the  re- 
hearsals of  his  work  as  a  father  at  the  birth  pf  his 
baby.  He  was  lucky  if  they  did  not  order  him  out 
of  the  house.  The  producer,  who  had  put  up  the 
money  for  the  play,  had  the  first  right  to  say  what 
should  be  in  the  play  for  which  he  had  put  up  the 
money.  The  stage  director,  hired  to  rehearse  the 
production,  began  immediately  to  suggest  changes 
in  the  play  in  order  to  show  that  he  was  worthy 
of  his  hire.  The  star  attempted  not  at  all  to  sub- 
due his  personality  to  the  part  he  had  to  play; 
he  busied  himself  subduing  the  part  to  his  person- 
ality. And  not  merely  that.  He  did  not  care 
whether  or  not  he  was  true  to  life;  he  considered 
only  whether  or  not  he  was  true  to  the  sympathies 
of  his  audience.  He  was  the  hero,  and  he  would 
not  say  or  do  anything  that  was  not  heroic.  He 
had  to  dominate  every  scene  in  which  he  shared; 
the  positions  and  the  speeches  of  the  other  char- 
acters had  to  be  arranged  to  show  his  dominance; 
and  the  whole  play  had  to  be  remolded  to  that 
end. 

It  was  one  of  those  plays  that  have  since  come 
to  be  called  "crook  melodramas."  The  hero  of  it 
was  a  desperado  who  had  stolen  a  child.  He  was  in 
love  with  the  Faro  Nell  of  the  gang.  He  contracted 
a  salutary  passion  for  the  mother  of  the  kidnapped 

[56] 


JANE    SHORE 


girl,  and  under  her  influence  he  reformed  and  he 
converted  his  fellow-criminals.  The  author  had 
been  a  police-court  reporter — before  he  became  a 
theatrical  press-agent — and  his  crooks  were  real 
and  their  lines  true,  though  his  plot  was  "bunk," 
as  he  admitted.  It  was  supposed  to  show  the  sav- 
ing influence  of  a  "good,  pure  woman"  upon  the 
criminal  mind. 

The  star  had  already  objected  to  talking  "thieves' 
slang,"  and  his  lines  had  been  rewritten.  Now  he 
objected  to  the  unrequited  ending  of  his  devotion 
to  the  child's  mother — so  she  was  made  a  widow; 
she  fell  into  his  arms  at  the  final  curtain — and 
Faro  Nell  had  to  cherish  the  only  unrequited  pas- 
sion in  the  play.  This,  however,  left  the  star  still 
a  reformed  criminal.  The  author  improvised  for 
him  a  noble  motive  of  revenge  upon  a  world  that 
had  done  him  wrong,  but  it  was  not  sufficient. 

"I'll  lose  them,"  the  star  said,  referring  to  the 
audience.  "I'll  lose  them  if  I  steal  that  child." 

The  difficulty  was  overcome  by  making  Faro 
Nell  take  the  actual  guilt  of  the  kidnapping,  and 
he  assumed  the  responsibility  in  order  to  protect 
her,  because  she  loved  him — poor  soul,  she  loved 
him.  And  then,  in  the  second  week  of  rehearsals, 
he  arrived  glowing  with  an  idea.  The  hero  should 
not  be  a  criminal  at  all.  He  should  be  an  honest, 
though  desperate,  man  whose  child  had  been  kid- 
napped and  whose  wife  had  died  of  grief.  He  had 
joined  the  criminal  band  to  learn  their  secrets  and 

[57] 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


betray  them  to  the  police.  Great  idea!  It  was 
acted  upon  at  once. 

By  this  time  the  meaning  of  the  play  had  been 
cheerfully  obliterated.  The  curtains  had  all  been 
changed.  The  characterization  of  the  hero  was  a 
crazy-quilt.  And  the  author  was  anxiously  trying 
to  add  explanatory  lines  to  account  for  actions 
that  the  recording  angel  himself  could  not  have 
audited  correctly. 

"That's  all  right,"  the  star  would  say.  "Don't 
worry  about  that.  They  won't  think  of  it  till  they 
leave  the  theater." 

To  do  the  author  justice,  he  was  not  greatly 
worried  by  what  was  going  on.  Above  all  else,  he 
wished  his  play  to  succeed;  and  these  expert  emen- 
dations were  designed  solely  to  achieve  success.  The 
producer  seemed  equally  satisfied;  he  had  seen 
such  things  done  before;  it  was  the  way  in  which 
successes  were  written.  And  the  actors,  accustomed 
to  the  divine  right  and  ruling  egotism  of  stars,  ac- 
cepted their  losses  and  their  gains — as  the  altera- 
tions either  reduced  or  fattened  then*  parts — with 
Christian  humility  and  resignation  when  they  stood 
in  the  eye  of  authority,  and  with  a  fierce  contempt 
and  jealousy  between  themselves. 

5 

Throughout  it  all  Jane  Shore  was  wonderful. 
Whatever  folly  the  star  did,  whatever  absurdity  he 
said,  she  watched  him  and  listened  to  him  with  a 

[58] 


JANE    SHORE 


deep-eyed  admiration  that  was  so  meek  and  so 
trustful  that  it  would  have  made  a  sick  dove  blush 
for  its  arrogance.  Faro  Nell  had  no  such  art.  She 
argued  with  the  star  at  the  third  rehearsal.  And 
when  her  part  began  to  dwindle — and  Jane  Shore's 
to  grow — she  knew  it  was  because  he  disliked  her 
and  wanted  to  keep  her  down.  She  began  to  scheme 
against  him.  She  even  appealed  to  me,  as  a  friend 
of  the  author;  and  I  began  to  discover,  behind  the 
outward  seeming  of  the  rehearsals,  a  concealed 
activity  of  intrigues,  stage  politics,  personal  am- 
bitions, plots,  and  counter-plots.  Parties  had  been 
formed,  influences  had  been  organized.  The  re- 
sulting struggle,  with  its  alliances  and  compromises, 
its  victories  and  its  defeats,  was  called  a  rehearsal. 
A  detailed  account  of  it  would  read  like  a  court 
memoir  of  the  days  of  a  grand  monarch.  And  the 
welfare  of  the  play,  that  was  to  carry  them  all, 
seemed  to  be  consulted  as  little  as  the  welfare  of 
the  country  that  supports  a  grand  monarch's  court. 

Jane  Shore  was  obviously  of  the  star's  party  and 
high  in  favor.  He  deprived  her  of  some  of  her  best 
lines — for  various  pretended  reasons,  but  really 
because  they  competed  with  his  own — and  she 
merely  said,  studiously:  "I  see.  Then  I  take  the 
next  cue,  do  I?" 

He  made  her  work  down-stage,  with  her  back 
to  the  footlights,  so  that  he  might  face  the  audience 
when  he  addressed  her;  and  she  said:  "Just  a 
minute.  Let  me  mark  the  position  on  my  part." 

159] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  made  her  "noise  up"  her  scenes  with  him,  so 
that  he  might  play  at  the  top  of  his  voice,  which 
was  his  only  way  of  expressing  emotion.  And  she 
ranted  diligently. 

He  made,  her  stand  as  motionless  as  a  dummy 
while  he  spoke  lines  to  her,  because  he  wanted  the 
audience's  undivided  attention  for  himself — and 
he  moved  and  gestured  as  much  as  he  pleased  while 
she  replied.  She  obeyed  him  religiously,  and  with 
every  look  she  called  him  "Master." 

It  was  touching  to  see.  When  you  consider  that 
she  knew  exactly  what  he  was  doing  and  despised 
Him  for  it,  it  was  a  masterpiece  of  art. 

He  took  her  out  to  luncheon  with  him.  He  took 
her  home  in  a  cab  when  it  rained.  They  were  seen 
together  in  a  box  at  a  benefit.  They  dined  at  his 
hotel.  She  was  pointed  out  as  his  new  leading 
woman — and  then  as  his  latest  affinity.  He  was 
already  paying  alimony  to  three  others,  and  the 
company  began  to  bet  on  whether  Jane  was  going 
to  take  the  first  step  toward  joining  his  Alimony 
Club.  "He  always  marries  them,"  they  explained. 
"He's  religious." 

They  were  a  respectable  lot  of  hard-working  men 
and  women,  but  they  had  no  illusions  about  their 
star.  They  admitted  that  he  was  a  handsome 
bully,  an  egotistical  cad,  a  bone-headed  matine'e 
idol,  a  strutting  lady-killer  with  all  the  delicate 
impulses  of  a  caveman.  One  of  them  said,  "He's 
the  kind  of  actor  that  ought  always  to  wear  a  wig 

[60] 


JANE    SHORE 


— as  a  protection  against  woodpeckers."  Faro 
Nell  summed  it  up,  "He's  the  lowest  form  of  hu- 
manity I've  ever  had  to  associate  with.'* 

6 

While  they  were  betting  on  Jane's  chances  for 
the  Alimony  Club,  it  began  to  be  evident  that  the 
producer  had  opened  another  competition.  He 
had  been  seen  at  the  opera  with  her.  Some  one 
whispered  it  around  that  he  was  calling  on  her  in 
her  apartment,  which  she  still  shared  with  her 
musical  friend.  He  had  not  yet  acquired  the  repu- 
tation for  sexual  rapacity  that  has  since  distin- 
guished him,  but  he  was  not  regarded  as  an  ascetic 
bachelor.  They  began  to  watch  Jane  Shore  with 
a  new  interest.  What  was  her  little  game?  How 
was  she  playing  it? 

As  far  as  I  could  see,  she  was  not  playing  it  at 
all.  At  rehearsals  she  was  entirely  frank  and  nat- 
ural, absorbed  in  her  work,  diligent,  and  biddable. 
It  was  evident  that  she  had  real  imagination; 
she  read  her  lines  in  the  correct  emotion,  without 
fumbling,  and  her  voice  was  rich  and  true.  She 
had  a  good  stage  presence  and  some  of  the  authority 
of  experience,  in  spite  of  the  meekness  that  made 
her  appear  unconscious  of  her  art.  Whatever  game 
was  being  played,  she  seemed  rather  the  innocent 
stake  than  the  chief  player.  She  deceived  me  com- 
pletely. She  certainly  deceived  the  star.  And  I 
think  she  deceived  the  producer. 

[61] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


He  had  been  an  East  Side  boy,  out  of  the  Ghetto 
— an  office-boy  in  a  theatrical  agency,  a  messenger- 
boy  and  assistant  in  a  box-office,  where  he  finally 
became  treasurer.  While  he  was  still  behind  the 
ticket-wicket  he  rented  the  theater  for  a  Hun- 
garian violinist  who  had  come  to  this  country  un- 
known, in  the  steerage.  The  violinist  startled  the 
critics  with  a  brilliant  and  poetical  virtuosity,  and 
charmed  a  fortune  into  his  own  pockets  and  his 
manager's.  The  production  of  my  friend's  play 
Vvas  to  be  the  entrance  of  this  coming  theatrical 
magnate  into  "the  legitimate."  And  nothing  less 
like  a  theatrical  magnate  could  be  imagined. 

He  was  the  embodiment  of  quiet,  plaintive- 
looking,  white-faced  silence,  with  an  unblinking 
eye  and  an  impersonal  voice.  And  he  is  still  that, 
although  he  now  divides  the  control  of  the  American 
stage  with  what  is  left  of  the  Big  Three.  He  is  a 
study.  I  believe  his  success  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
he  is  so  pathetic,  so  apparently  trusting,  and  so 
appealing,  that  the  Big  Three  assisted  him  out  of 
mere  charity.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  is  as  crafty 
in  business  as  a  society  woman.  He  breaks  con- 
tracts like  a  tearful  widow  when  he  is  losing 
money  by  them.  When  it  is  the  other  party  to  the 
contract  who  is  losing  he  can  be  as  chalkily  indif- 
ferent and  implacable  as  a  Chinaman. 

Jane  Shore  discovered  in  him  the  soul  of  a  musi- 
cian. It  had  been  his  first  ambition  to  be  a  violinist; 
all  that  he  could  save  from  his  earnings  as  an  office- 

[62] 


JANE    SHORE 


boy  he  had  put  into  a  fiddle;  and  he  still  played  it 
secretly,  with  much  melancholy  feeling,  but  no 
technic.  Hence  his  original  venture  with  the  Hun- 
garian violinist  whose  art  he  had  appreciated  in- 
stantly when  he  heard  him  in  an  East  Side  cafe. 
Hence,  also,  his  visits  to  Jane  Shore's  apartments, 
where  her  friend  played  the  violin  and  Jane  sang 
to  the  piano. 

"He  was  in  love  with  me,  I  know,"  Jane  has 
since  confessed,  "but  I  found  out  that  he  was 
mad  about  his  mother,  and  she  was  so  orthodox 
that  it  would  have  killed  her  to  have  him  marry 
a  Christian.  And  he  never  even  hinted  at  any- 
thing else.  He's  really  rather  a  dear.  It's  his 
mother's  fault — the  way  he's  going  on,  now,  with 
chorus-girls.'* 

There  is  no  doubt  that  Jane  Shore's  beauty  and 
culture  and  air  of  "class"  reached  some  early 
marrow  of  subservience  in  his  bones.  When  he 
was  with  her,  as  one  of  the  company  expressed  it, 
"he  looked  as  wistful  as  a  sucked  orange." 

Her  success  with  the  star  was  another  matter. 
"All  he  wanted,"  she  says,  "was  a  mirror" — a 
flattering  feminine  regard  before  which  he  could 
pose  and  admire  himself.  "He  never  talked;  he 
boasted.  He  boasted  of  how  much  money  he'd 
made  with  his  other  plays.  How  much  he'd  won 
on  the  stock-market.  How  he'd  picked  a  twenty- 
to-one  shot  on  the  races.  How  he'd  told  Augustin 
Daly  what  he  thought  of  him.  How  he'd  pulled 

[63] 


Charlie  Frohman's  nose.  What  he  said  to  a  fire- 
man who  tried  to  stop  him  smoking  behind  the 
scenes.  How  he'd  thrashed  a  cheeky  waiter,  and 
an  elevator-man  who  insulted  him,  and  a  cabman 
who  tried  to  overcharge  him.  And  even  how  he'd 
silenced  JVlaurice  Barrymore  with  the  superior 
brilliance  of  his  repartee." 

He  never  boasted  to  her  of  his  previous  conquests. 
No  doubt  they  had  been  merely  mirrors,  as  she 
said.  As  long  as  they  gave  him  a  flattering  reflec- 
tion, he  treasured  them.  As  soon  as  one  grew  tar- 
nished in  the  brightness  of  her  complacency,  he 
tossed  her  into  the  matrimonial  dust-box,  paid  for 
the  breakage  like  a  gentleman,  and  looked  for  an- 
other glass.  An  audience  was  a  sea  of  mirrors  to 
him,  and  the  image  that  he  saw  reflected  there  was 
that  of  a  fine,  upstanding,  robust  hero  who  never 
did  a  human  thing  on  the  stage  or  said  a  true  one. 
He  was  an  actor  by  virtue  of  the  fact  that  he  "put 
across  the  footlights  "  the  fictitious  personality  that 
had  made  him  popular.  And  he  did  not  know  it 
was  fictitious.  Obviously  he  did  not  know  it. 
He  saw  himself  in  the  eyes  of  admiration  only,  and 
never  suspected  the  truth  about  himself. 

7 

At  the  dress  rehearsal  there  began  to  appear  one 
truth  about  him  that  few  of  us  suspected :  he  could 
not  act.  He  had  almost  no  imagination.  He  had 
a  certain  easy  grace,  a  confident  manner,  and  a 

[64] 


JANE    SHORE 


large  voice.  The  rest  had  been  done  for  him  by 
good  stage  directors.  In  this  case  the  stage  direct- 
or had  been  unable  to  control  him,  because  he 
owned  a  fif ty-per-cent.  interest  in  the  play — in  lieu 
of  salary — and  the  producer  had  let  him  have  his 
way  unchecked.  As  a  consequence  he  had  been  so 
busy  telling  every  one  else  how  to  act  that  no  one 
had  noticed  his  own  performance.  It  was  taken  for 
granted  that  when  the  moment  arrived  he  would 
open  out  like  a  magic  rose. 

At  the  dress  rehearsal,  when  he  opened  out  to 
nothing  but  resonant  vacuity,  we  could  not  believe 
our  ears.  "I  need  my  audience,"  he  explained. 
"I'm  dead  without  it."  And  we  all  accepted  the 
explanation  as  sufficient — all  except  Jane  Shore. 
She  had  endured  much  from  him  in  the  belief 
that,  though  he  was  an  egotistical  and  selfish 
bore,  he  could  act.  After  her  first  scene  with 
him  at  the  dress  rehearsal  she  realized,  with  pro- 
fessional contempt,  that  "he  wasn't  there."  Con- 
fronting him,  with  her  back  continually  to  the 
footlights,  she  allowed  a  mild  withdrawal  of  her 
admiration  to  appear  in  her  face,  and  that  dis- 
couraged him. 

When  they  came  to  the  big  scene  in  the  third 
act — the  love  scene  in  which  he  returned  her  child 
to  her — she  suddenly  let  herself  go.  At  sight  of 
her  little  daughter  coming  through  the  door  she 
uttered  a  scream  of  agonized  joy  so  poignant  that 
it  stabbed  into  you  instantly  and  struck  tears.  She 

165] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


fell  on  her  knees  and  caught  the  girl  to  her  in  a  sort 
of  animal  transport  of  maternal  ecstasy,  and  in- 
stead of  kissing  the  child  on  the  face  she  kissed  it 
on  the  breast,  so  that  you  saw  the  adored  little 
body  naked  from  the  bath,  and  her  nuzzling 
it,  panting  inarticulate  endearments  hysterically, 
choked  with  heart-easing  sobs.  It  was  a  truly 
dramatic  moment,  and  it  came  upon  the  dull  medi- 
ocrity of  the  rehearsal  like  a  flash  of  genius.  It 
frightened  the  little  girl,  who  began  to  cry.  It  took 
the  stage  away  from  the  star;  he  stood  staring  at 
her  in  jealous  silence.  Behind  me  I  heard  a  quaint 
sort  of  nasal  moan,  and  looked  around  to  see  the 
little  producer  struggling  to  control  the  whimpering 
distortion  of  his  face. 

The  star  came  down  to  the  footlights  and  began 
to  explain  that  the  whole  scene  would  be  ruined  if 
she  overplayed  it  that  way.  It  was  a  love  scene. 
The  point  of  it  was:  did  he  get  her,  not  did  she  get 
the  child.  Her  emotion  should  be  one  of  gratitude 
to  him  for  returning  the  girl  to  her.  This  cat-fit 
over  the  kid  would  kill  the  whole  movement  of  the 
plot. 

The  stage  director  said,  impatiently:  "Yes. 
Go  ahead  with  the  act.  We'll  fix  it  after  the 
rehearsal." 

The  scene  went  on.  The  director  joined  the  pro- 
ducer behind  me,  and  I  heard  him  say:  "There's 
nothin*  else  to  it.  She's  immense."  And — though 
I  did  not  appreciate,  at  the  moment,  what  had  hap- 

[66] 


JANE    SHORE 


pened — with  these  words  Jane  Shore  was  launched 
on  her  triumphant  career. 

8 

After  the  rehearsal  there  was  a  long  and  angry 
conference  between  the  star,  the  director,  the  pro- 
ducer, and  the  author*  The  star  said  a  great  deal; 
the  author  said  nothing;  the  producer  said  little, 
and  the  stage  director  said  one  thing  over  and  over. 
It  was  this:  "It's  sure  fire.  We've  got  to  have  it. 
It's  mother-love,  I  tell  you.  It's  mother-love. 
Broadway  '11  fall  for  it  with  a  yell.  It's  sure  fire. 
It  never  missed  yet.  Broadway  's  always  strong  for 
its  mother.  Its  wife's  a  joke.  But  its  mother! 
Oh,  boy !  It's  sure  fire.  We've  got  to  have  it.  It's 
mother-love,  I  tell  you.  It's  mother-love."  And 
he  struck  his  breast  argumentatively  every  time  he 
said  "mother-love" — to  indicate  the  seat  of  the 
appeal.  And  every  time  he  struck  his  breast  the 
producer  nodded  solemnly. 

It  was  evident  that  Jane  Shore  had  chosen  the 
right  scene  to  steal.  "I  knew  it,"  she  laughed.  "I 
knew  they'd  never  let  him  take  that  away  from  me." 
She  had  seen  the  producer's  face,  as  I  had  seen  it, 
contorted  with  emotion.  ^"He's  mad  about  his 
mother,"  she  explained. 

This  was  Sunday  afternoon,  in  Atlantic  City. 
The  play  was  to  open  Monday  night  in  a  theater 
on  the  boardwalk.  And  when  the  star  failed  to 
shake  the  power  of  mother-love  in  the  breast  of 

[67] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


the  management  he  hurried  to  Jane  Shore's  hotel, 
in  the  hope  of  persuading  her  to  give  up  the 
scene. 

She  had  expected  him.  She  was  out  taking  the 
air  in  a  rolling-chair.  She  remained  out  till  after 
dark;  and  he  did  not  find  her  till  he  caught  her  at 
her  dinner,  that  evening,  alone  in  a  far  corner  of 
the  dining-room,  away  from  the  music. 

She  rose,  as  she  saw  him  coming,  and  she  greeted 
him  rather  excitedly.  "I'm  so  glad  you  came," 
she  said  in  a  low  voice,  clinging  to  his  hand.  "I've 
had  such  a  fright." 

"What  is  it?"  he  demanded,  instantly  protective. 
"What's  happened?" 

"It's  all  right  now,"  she  said.  "A  man's  been 
following  me."  And  she  moved  her  eyes  to  indicate 
an  adjoining  table  where  a  lonely  diner  sat  reading 
his  newspaper — or  pretending  to — and  smoking  a 
cigar. 

Unfortunately  for  the  decorum  of  the  dining- 
room,  as  the  star  looked  at  him  he  lowered  the 
paper  and  spied  over  the  top  of  it  at  Jane  Shore  with 
an  air  of  watching  her  from  ambush.  All  the  actor's 
rage  at  the  stage  director  instantly  focused  on  this 
peeping  Tom.  And  his  rage  was  reinforced  by 
policy;  he  wished  to  do  something  to  put  Jane 
Shore  under  grateful  obligation  to  him.  He  crossed 
at  once  to  the  table  and  struck  down  the  paper, 
with  an  oath.  In  doing  so  he  uncovered  the  pro- 
portions of  a  man  whom  he  would  never  have  chal- 

[68] 


JANE    SHORE 


lenged  if  he  had  seen  him  first.  The  man  rose  to 
his  feet  and  struck  back. 

Jane  Shore  slipped  quietly  away. 

When  the  waiters  rushed  in  to  stop  the  dis- 
order the  star  was  sitting  on  the  floor,  his  nose 
bleeding  and  one  eye  closed,  and  the  stranger 
was  walking  composedly  to  the  door,  with  his 
cigar  in  his  mouth. 

He  overtook  Jane  Shore  in  the  hall.  "You've 
forgotten  me,  Miss  Widgen,"  he  said. 

She  looked  at  him  with  bright  intentness.  "Oh, 
of  course!"  she  cried.  "/  know!  You're  Tom! 
From  the  drug-store!" 

He  nodded,  smiling.  She  held  out  her  hand, 
delighted.  He  was  the  clerk  who  had  given  her 
pony  a  drink  of  soda-water  the  day  that  she  rode 
into  the  drug-store  and  demanded  refreshment  for 
herself  and  her  horse.  Evidently  he  was  no  longer 
a  clerk,  but  she  did  not  ask  for  any  explanations. 

"Why,"  she  cried,  "I  didn't  know  you!  Why 
didn't  you  speak  to  me?" 

She  took  his  arm  and  hurried  him  away  from  the 
dining-room  where  the  star,  with  his  nose  in  a 
table-napkin,  was  explaining  to  a  friendly  head 
waiter  that  it  was  nothing,  a  private  affair,  a  gentle- 
manly misunderstanding. 

She  was  saying  girlishly  to  Tom:  "How  strange 
to  meet  you  here,  after  all  these  years!  What 
are  you  doing?  Come  up  and  sit  on  the  porch 
with  me." 

[69] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


She  did  not  ask  what  he  had  done  with  the  star. 
She  guessed  it  from  what  she  had  seen,  over  her 
shoulder,  as  she  passed  out  the  door.  And  Tom 
did  not  make  any  guilty  explanations.  He  had  not 
been  following  her.  He  had  been  finishing  his  din- 
ner when  she  sat  down  at  a  neighboring  table,  and 
he  had  stared  at  her  only  a  little  more  than  she  was 
accustomed  to  being  stared  at  by  solitary  diners 
in  such  circumstances. 

"Who  was  that  fellow  who — who  spoke  to  me?" 
he  asked,  as  they  went  up-stairs. 

"Oh,  he's  a  crazy  actor,"  she  said.  "I'll  tell 
you  about  him  later.  Tell  me  first  about  yourself." 

He  told  her,  on  the  balcony,  in  the  moonlight, 
looking  out  at  the  misted  ocean — while  the  star  was 
having  his  bruised  face  washed  and  bandaged  by 
his  valet  in  the  bathroom  of  his  suite. 

And  what  he  told  her  was  one  of  those  fairy-tales 
of  modern  American  business  that  put  to  shame  the 
inventions  of  fiction.  Briefly,  he  was  no  longer  a 
druggist's  clerk.  A  moment  of  prophetic  thought 
had  made  him  a  millionaire.  It  had  occurred  to 
him,  over  a  bottle  of  extract  of  pepsin,  that  the 
two  American  passions  for  chewing-gum  and  for 
patent  medicine  might  be  profitably  combined  if 
you  put  pepsin  in  the  gum.  He  had  sold  the  idea, 
on  a  royalty  basis,  to  a  chewing-gum  manufacturer. 
And  after  successfully  defending  himself  in  court 
from  an  attempt  to  steal  his  rights  he  was  now  de- 
voting himself  to  his  health,  his  leisure,  physical 

[70] 


JANE    SHORE 


culture,  and  the  search  for  safe  investments.  He 
was  not  married.  Fanny  Widgen  had  been  an 
unattainable  ideal  of  his  days  behind  the  counter, 
and  he  still  felt  romantic  about  her.  He  did  not  say 
so.  He  did  not  need  to.  She  knew  it  from  his  man- 
ner of  recalling  her  and  her  pony  and  the  sight  of 
her  driving  past  the  blue  and  crimson  bottles  of  the 
druggist's  window  in  her  dog-cart. 

She  explained,  then,  about  the  star,  laughing  un- 
blushingly.  "I  didn't  want  to  give  him  back  the 
scene,  and  I  didn't  want  to  talk  to  him  about  it. 
I  couldn't  say  I  wouldn't,  you  know.  That  would 
have  made  too  much  trouble.  So  I  let  him  think 
you  had  been  annoying  me.  I  hadn't  recognized 
you,  of  course.  I  knew  I  could  escape  if  he'd 
only  start  a  row.  And  he'd  boasted  so  much 
about  *  beating  up'  waiters  and  elevator -men 
that  I  thought  he'd  jump  at  the  opportunity  to 
make  a  hero  of  himself  for  me.  Did  you  hurt 
him?" 

"I  don't  think  so,"  he  said,  modestly.  "Not 
much.  I  may  have  blacked  one  of  his  eyes." 

"Blacked  his  eye!" 

"They  must  have  been  all  elevator-boys  that  he'd 
been  beating  up." 

"He  probably  never  fought  any  one  in  his  life 
before,"  she  said.  And  she  added,  reflectively, 
"Blacked  his  eye!" 

That  was  serious.  It  was  serious  for  everybody 
— the  producer,  the  author,  the  whole  company. 

6  [71] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


How  was  he  to  play  his  part  with  a  black  eye?  And 
if  he  could  not  play  his  part,  how  about  the  opening? 

9 

He  kept  his  room  all  the  following  day,  and  we 
had  to  be  satisfied  with  second-hand  reports.  He 
explained  that  he  had  tripped  on  the  boardwalk 
and  fallen  with  his  face  against  the  railing.  Rumor 
promptly  added  that  he  had  been  drunk.  Jane 
Shore  did  not  contradict  the  rumor.  She  contented 
herself  with  telephoning  to  thank  him  for  his  gal- 
lantry and  his  silence.  "It  was  so  kind  of  you," 
she  said,  "to  protect  me  from  gossip  by  not  telling 
about  that  awful  man.  I  suppose  you  nearly  killed 
him." 

He  replied,  grimly,  "Well,  he'll  never  bother 
you  again." 

She  repeated  that  to  us,  weeks  later,  with  gurgles 
of  delight,  as  if  it  were  a  piece  of  boarding-school 
mischief. 

He  wanted  to  see  her,  to  talk  to  her,  and  she  in- 
vited him  to  be  at  the  theater  at  seven.  He  was 
there.  They  had  a  long  conference.  She  had  an- 
other with  the  producer.  I  heard  from  the  author 
that  the  star  had  threatened  to  give  up  the  play 
unless  it  was  played  the  way  he  wanted  it.  There 
were  more  conferences,  while  the  audience  gathered 
into  the  theater  and  the  orchestra  struck  up  a 
rusty  overture.  They  were  still  conferring  when  I 
went  out  to  find  a  vacancy  in  the  back  row,  and  the 

[72] 


JANE    SHORE 


stage  director,  as  I  passed  him,  was  saying:  "I  tell 
you  he's  a  four-flush.  You  watch  him  to-night. 
Never  mind  her.  Let  her  play  to  her  limit.  Watch 
him." 

I  watched  him  myself.  And  when  he  came  on 
the  stage — for  an  entrance  that  had  been  carefully 
built  to — the  chill  that  quivered  over  the  house  was 
almost  an  audible  expression  of  perplexity.  He 
was  made  up  very  pale,  with  his  eyes  darkened — 
both  eyes — and  one  of  them  bloodshot.  He  wore 
a  wig  that  came  low  on  his  forehead,  to  cover  the 
lump  of  a  bruise.  He  looked  sinister,  unwholesome, 
anything  but  the  matinee  idol  that  we  had  come 
there  to  see.  And  I  offer  it  without  apology:  Jane 
Shore  had  done  it.  She  had  persuaded  him  that 
as  a  desperate  man  who  had  lost  a  wife  and 
child — a  tragic  widower  defying  death  among  a 
band  of  criminals — he  ought  to  be  made  up  in 
this  "interesting"  manner.  It  would  conceal  his 
bruises. 

His  failure  was  unqualified — as  unqualified  as  her 
success.  Everything  heroic  that  he  said  was  con- 
tradicted by  his  appearance;  and  any  one  who  has 
worked  in  the  theater  will  understand  how  the  eye 
will  overcome  the  ear  in  such  circumstances.  He 
was  immediately  aware  that  the  house  was  cold  to 
him;  and,  not  being  able  to  see  himself  with  the 
eyes  of  the  audience,  he  did  not  know  what  was  the 
matter;  he  thought  that  the  part  was  "unsym- 
pathetic." He  could  not  get  any  heart  into  it. 

173] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


Jane  Shore  did  not  help  him.  She  played  in 
a  low  key,  with  repressed  intensity,  in  a  technic 
that  he  could  not  handle,  and  when  they  were 
on  the  stage  together  the  audience  went  to  her. 
Even  with  her  back  to  them  she  dominated 
him.  She  clasped  her  hands  behind  her  and 
in  his  emotional  passages  she  opened  and  closed 
them,  unknown  to  him,  and  they  were  as  ex- 
pressive as  the  dumb  mouth  of  a  gasping  fish. 
She  killed  the  biggest  moment  of  one  of  his 
most  thrilling  speeches  by  dropping  her  hand- 
kerchief behind  her,  as  if  from  fingers  paralyzed 
with  secret  emotion.  A  shudder  of  her  shoulders 
was  more  eloquent  than  his  ranting.  And  when 
it  came  to  the  scene  with  the  child  she  took 
the  stage  away  from  him,  took  the  house  away 
from  him,  took  the  applause  and  the  curtain 
away  from  him,  and  topped  it  all  by  receiving 
across  the  footlights  an  armful  of  roses  after  a  pretty 
play  of  girlish  shyness  and  hesitation — as  if  to 
say:  "For  me?  They  can't  be  for  me!  Aren't 
they  the  star's?" — until  tke  audience  had  to  au- 
thorize and  enforce  the  tribute  with  an  ovation  of 
handclapping  and  gallery  whistles  and  the  pound- 
ing of  imperative  feet. 

The  hesitation  was  affected,  of  course.  The 
roses  were  Tom's  and  she  had  expected  them. 

She  was  almost  compelled  to  make  a  speech. 
She  did  go  so  far  as  to  shake  her  head  in  a  refusal 
to  make  one. 

[74] 


JANE    SHORE 


"That  finishes  it,"  the  author  groaned  in  my 
ear.  "He'll  never  play  it  again.  Never." 

The  last  act  was  entirely  hers.  The  star  sulked 
his  way  through  it,  saying  mere  words. 

The  author  left  me.  I  supposed  he  had  gone  to 
throw  himself  in  the  surf. 

The  audience  crowded  out,  saying:  "Who  is 
she?  Isn't  she  wonderful?  .  .  .  Charming!  Such 
grace!  .  .  .  Well,  she  certainly  takes  that  part  off 
fine." 

Out  of  a  spirit  of  sympathy  for  the  author,  I 
went  back  to  the  hotel  and  to  bed  without  joining 
in  the  post-mortem.  I  had  felt  all  along  that  the 
play  was  a  conglomeration  of  fatuous  nonsense, 
anyway.  One  always  feels  that  way  about  a 
friend's  play. 

And  next  morning  I  found  that — as  usual — 
while  I  slept  all  the  really  important  things  of  life 
had  happened.  The  others  had  been  up  all  night. 
The  star  had  left  for  Florida,  with  an  incipient  at- 
tack of  press-agent's  pneumonia,  having  broken 
his  contract,  abandoned  his  interest  in  the  produc- 
tion, insulted  Jane  Shore,  and  had  his  other  eye 
blacked  by  a  little  property-man  named  Fritz  Hoff 
who  hated  him.  An  unexpected  millionaire  had 
"bought  in"  on  the  play,  and  this  was  the  same 
millionaire  who  had  been  guilty  of  the  barrelful  of 
American  Beauty  roses  across  the  footlights.  "Tom 
the  Gum-man"  we  came  to  call  him.  The  author 
was  busy  rewriting  again  in  order  to  make  a  star 

[75] 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


part  for  Jane  Shore.  The  stage  director  was  help- 
ing by  beating  his  breast  like  a  gorilla  and  howling 
for  more  mother-love.  A  young  leading  man,  in 
answer  to  a  wire  from  Jane  Shore,  was  coming 
from  Washington  to  rehearse  the  part  in  which  the 
star  had  fallen  down.  A  New  York  manager  had 
agreed  to  take  the  Atlantic  City  theater  off  their 
hands  for  the  latter  part  of  the  week.  And  the  pro- 
ducer was  leaving  for  Broadway  and  the  booking- 
offices,  to  arrange  for  an  out-of-town  opening  for 
Jane  Shore  in  "a  new  American  drama"  within 
the  month. 

10 

Her  success  in  that  opening  is  so  much  a  part  of 
the  history  of  our  stage  that  I  hardly  need  refer 
to  it.  There  is  an  accurate  account  of  it  in  one  of 
William  Winter's  books.  He  hailed  her,  if  I  re- 
member, as  a  young  Madame  Janauschek— for  she 
played  her  cheap  melodrama  with  such  eloquence 
and  distinction  that  comparisons  with  the  old 
school  were  inevitable.  She  showed,  in  her  later 
plays,  that  she  was  modern  and  naturalistic;  and 
Mr.  Winter  felt  that  she  was  a  noble  promise  un- 
fulfilled. She  shrugged  her  shoulders  and  went 
ahead.  What  her  theory  of  her  art  is  I  do  not  know. 
I  suspect  that  she  is  largely  innocent  of  any.  Vir- 
ginia Tracy  has  written  of  her:  "I  don't  believe  she 
ever  in  her  life  gave  two  thoughts  to  anything  ex- 
cept the  smashing  out  of  certain  congenial  dramatic 

[76] 


JANE   SHORE 


effects,  quite  unrelatedly  to  anything  but  her  will 
to  put  those  individual  effects  across."  And  in 
that  respect  she  is  certainly  the  creature  of  con- 
ditions on  the  modern  American  stage. 

Her  acting,  I  should  say,  is  intuitional.  It  is 
not  the  result  of  any  logical  process  of  thought 
and  study,  although  she  pretends  that  it  is.  She 
acts  with  two  lobes  of  her  brain,  one  of  which 
governs  the  utterance  of  emotion  with  sincere  con- 
vincingness, and  the  other  watches  the  audience, 
the  stage,  and  her  own  performance  with  critical 
detachment.  You  will  see  her  come  off  from  a  big 
scene  with  her  lower  face  working  hysterically  and 
her  eyes  unconcerned  and  cold.  When  enthusiasm 
crowds  into  her  dressing-room  to  congratulate  her 
she  receives  it,  like  royalty  at  an  audience,  with  a 
charmingly  happy  smile,  but  with  a  back-thought 
showing,  if  you  look  for  it,  in  the  attentive  scrutiny 
of  her  gaze. 

However,  it  is  not  her  art  that  I  am  concerned 
with.  She  is  a  great  actress,  perhaps.  She  is  cer- 
tainly a  fascinating  character.  I  have  done  her 
injustice  in  this  account  of  her  first  success  if  I 
have  not  indicated  that,  though  she  was  incredibly 
crafty  in  her  handling  of  the  star,  she  was  also  im- 
pulsive, full  of  deviltry,  a  person  of  incalculable 
temperament.  It  was  certainly  an  impulse  of  mis- 
chief that  prompted  her  to  start  that  dining-room 
fight,  although  she  took  such  excellent  advantage 
of  the  results  of  it.  She  is  tricky.  "Of  course  I'm 

[77] 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


tricky,"  she  says.  "Could  any  one  who  is  not 
tricky  get  ahead  in  the  theater?'*  She  is  deeply 
egotistic.  "Well,'*  she  asks,  "do  you  think  it's 
possible  to  be  as  modest  as  a  hermit-thrush  and 
still  make  your  living  singing  at  the  entrance  to 
Brooklyn  Bridge  during  rush  hours?"  She  has 
faults  of  pettiness  that  seem  impossibly  opposed 
to  her  large  and  generous  qualities;  but  with  all 
the  disintegrating  impulses  of  variable  tempera- 
ment and  contradictory  moods,  she  has  a  strength 
of  will  that  gives  her  character  and  direction. 

11 

My  friend  the  author  fell  insanely  in  love  with 
her.  She  petted  him  and  encouraged  him  amiably 
until  it  came  to  a  question  of  marrying  him.  "No," 
she  said.  "No.  Never.'*  Well,  but  why  not? 
"Because  it's  impossible."  She  refused  to  see  him. 
She  would  not  answer  his  letters.  He  behaved 
like  a  lunatic,  drinking  and  weeping  in  all  the 
cafes  of  the  Rialto.  I  went  to  her,  to  speak  on  his 
behalf;  and  she  listened  to  me,  sitting  bolt-upright 
beside  her  reading-lamp,  with  her  hands  on  the  arms 
of  her  chair,  as  unmoved  as  a  judge. 

She  said:  "I  can't  help  it.  That's  the  way  life 
is.  He'll  have  to  get  through  it  the  best  way 
he  can.'* 

I  begged  her  to  see  him.  She  shook  her  head. 
"I'll  never  see  him  again."  And  she  kept  her  word, 
for  years. 

[78] 


JANE    SHORE 


Tom  the  Gum-man  came  to  a  similarly  violent 
end  with  her.  "He's  too  possessive,"  she  said. 
"He  thinks  he  invented  me.  He'll  be  in  court 
next,  defending  his  royalty  rights  in  me." 

He  went  off  in  a  rage  and  married  the  daughter 
of  another  prophylactic  millionaire.  She  sent  him 
a  signed  photograph  of  herself  as  a  wedding-present, 
and  apparently  forgot  him. 

On  the  other  hand,  she  never  rested  till  she  won 
her  father  back, 

As  soon  as  she  made  her  first  success  she  sent 
him  the  seven  hundred  dollars  that  she  had  "bor- 
rowed" to  leave  home.  He  returned  the  check 
without  a  word.  She  sent  it  back,  and  he  returned 
the  letter  unopened.  She  made  out  the  check  to 
her  brother  Ben — who  had  a  saving  habit — and 
she  wired  her  father,  "Have  sent  Ben  money  with 
thanks."  It  did  not  come  back. 

She  subscribed  to  a  clipping  bureau  for  her 
father  and  ordered  every  printed  word  about  Jane 
Shore  sent  to  him.  He  tried  to  countermand  the 
order,  but  the  bureau  continued  to  fill  it,  and  she 
paid  the  bills.  The  larger  they  were  the  happier 
she  was.  "Send  him  everything,"  she  ordered, 
"even  the  advertisements." 

She  wired  him  good  wishes  on  his  birthday,  on 
Christmas  and  New-Year's,  on  holidays  and  holy 
days.  On  Lincoln's  Birthday  she  telegraphed,  "Let 
us  have  peace."  And  on  Washington's  she  wired, 
"Are  you  prouder  than  G.  W.?  He  was  the  father 

[79] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


of  his  country  and  now  look  at  the  darn  thing." 
He  replied,  "Stop  sending  silly  telegrams."  She 
wired  back:  "Letters  did  not  seem  to  reach  you. 
Am  writing." 

She  wrote  without  replies  and  sent  him  presents 
without  acknowledgments;  and  finally,  when  she 
was  playing  in  Philadelphia,  she  called  on  him 
in  his  office  and  laughed  him  out  of  his  resent- 
ment. He  went  to  see  her  in  "Romeo  and 
Juliet,"  and  he  was  scandalized  by  the  love 
scenes,  which  she  played  with  frank  passion. 
"All  right,  Dad,"  she  said.  "There  was  twelve 
hundred  dollars  in  the  house.  You  know,  you 
have  to  be  a  bit  scandalous  to  do  that  amount 
of  business  in  a  godly  town  like  Philadelphia. 
Nothing  has  drawn  as  well  as  that,  here,  since 
'The  Black  Crook.'" 

"It's  a  disgrace,"  he  scolded.  "A  daughter  of 
mine  going  on  like  that  in  public.  A  respectable 
girl!" 

"Respectable!"  she  cried.  "I'm  so  respectable 
I  can't  get  my  name  in  the  papers  without  paying 
for  it." 

And  indeed  she  was  so  respectable  that  whenever 
any  one  attacked  the  moral  conditions  on  our  stage, 
Mrs.  Fiske,  in  replying,  never  failed  to  refer  to  the 
immaculate  record  and  reputation  of  Jane  Shore. 
With  whatever  abandon  she  played  Juliet  or  the 
proposal  scene  in  Shaw's  "Satan's  Advocate,"  she 
was  always  primly  chaperoned,  off  the  stage,  by 

[80] 


JANE    SHORE 


the  inhibitions  of  her  Calvinistic  and  Quaker  an- 
cestors.   The  nearest  she  ever  came  to  scandal — 

12 

It  was  quite  recently,  at  Madame  Bernhardt's 
professional  matinee,  in  the  Empire  Theater,  on 
her  last  tour.  Jane  Shore  was  in  the  stage-box  on 
the  right-hand  side  with  her  old  admirer,  Tom  the 
Gum-man.  A  wife  and  three  children  had  not  pre- 
vented him  from  returning  to  an  apparently  Pla- 
tonic devotion  for  his  first  love.  And  from  the  rise 
of  the  curtain,  from  the  first  sight  of  Bernhardt 
as  Hecube  on  her  throne,  Jane  Shore  wept  quietly, 
continuously,  without  a  word  of  explanation,  with- 
out a  movement  of  applause.  She  wept,  not  at  the 
tragedy  of  the  queen,  or  the  soldier  mortally 
wounded  on  the  "field  of  honor,"  or  Camille  dying 
in  her  lover's  arms;  she  wept  for  the  greater  tragedy 
of  that  indomitable  artist,  pinned  down  by  bodily 
infirmity,  with  nothing  left  to  her  but  her  head  and 
her  hands,  struggling — and  with  such  heartrending 
success,  with  the  voice  of  a  young,  unconquerable 
spirit,  with  an  art  that  ought  to  be  eternal — 
struggling  to  hold  her  little  circle  of  light  and  brill- 
iance against  the  dark  stifle  of  oblivion  that  was 
closing  in  on  her,  that  was  creeping  up  on  her, 
that  had  risen  already  to  her  throat.  Here,  after 
such  a  career  as  Jane  Shore  could  never  hope  for, 
here  was  the  visible  end.  When  that  voice  ceased, 
when  that  unsubmerged,  defiant  head  sank  under 

[81] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


the  silence,  what  would  be  left  of  the  fame  and 
the  triumphs  even  of  Sarah  Bernhardt? 

"What's  the  matter?"  Tom  asked  her  in  the 
auto  on  their  way  home.  "Don't  cry  like  that. 
You'll  make  yourself  ill." 

She  shook  her  head.  She  reached  out  and  took 
his  hand  blindly.  They  drove  in  silence  through  the 
evening  drizzle. 

She  did  not  speak  until  they  were  in  her  front 
room.  She  was  dry -eyed  and  tragic-looking.  "Come 
here,"  she  said,  holding  out  her  hand  to  him.  He 
sat  beside  her  on  the  sofa.  It  was  the  sofa  from  the 
proposal  scene  of  "Satan's  Advocate."  She  said, 
"Take  me  away  from  all  this." 

"What?" 

"Take  me  away.  You  want  me.  You've  always 
wanted  me.  Take  me  away,  out  West  somewhere 
— where  you  can  get  your  divorce." 

"But  my  dear  girl,"  he  said,  "do  you  know  what 
you're  saying?  Do  you  know  what  it  means?" 
He  had  released  her  hand,  blank  with  amazement. 

"Yes,  yes,"  she  cried.  "I  know.  I  want  to  end 
it  all.  No  more.  Not  even  to-night.  Take  me 
away." 

He  rose  slowly.    "But,"  he  said.    "But—" 

She  flung  out  her  hands.  "I  know.  I  know. 
The  talk — the  scandal — I  don't  care.  I  don't  want 
ever  again  to  see  their  silly  faces  over  the  foot- 
lights. It's  all —  It  doesn't  matter.  It's  nothing. 
You've  wanted — you've  always  wanted  me.  You're 

[82] 


JANE    SHORE 


unhappy.  We're  both  unhappy.  I  want  to  end  it. 
I  want  to  get — whatever  there's  left  for  me  to  get 
— before  I'm  old  and — and  pitiful.  I  don't  want 
to  be  alone  then — now — ever  any  more."  And  she 
began  to  weep  again. 

"My  God!"  he  said.  "E  you'd  done  this  ten 
years  ago!" 

"I  know,"  she  sobbed.    "But  I  didn't!" 

He  began  to  walk  up  and  down  the  room.  "I 
wouldn't  care  for  myself,"  he  explained,  "but  I 
can't  take  advantage  of  a  mood  like  this,  to  rush 
you  into  a  position —  You'd  hate  me.  You  don't 
appreciate  what  you're  doing.  With  the  people 
waiting  for  you,  and  the  seats  sold — running  away 
like  this,  with  a  married  man — and  all  the  pub- 
licity and  the  scandal." 

She  sat  up,  staring  at  him.  He  was  a  big,  dark 
man,black-mustached;  and  he  stood  uncomfortably, 
with  his  hands  deep  in  his  pockets,  his  head  down, 
blinking  at  the  floor,  and  talking  in  a  rumbling, 
grumbling  voice.  "He  looked,"  she  said  afterward, 
"like  a  fat  boy  who  was  being  tempted  to  play 
hooky  from  school."  And  suddenly,  in  the  midst 
of  his  perfectly  reasonable  remonstrances,  she  began 
to  laugh. 

He  started  as  if  she  had  struck  him.  He  turned 
on  her,  red,  ridiculous.  "Have  you  been  playing 
some  damn  game  with  me?"  he  demanded. 

"No — no,"  she  shouted,  at  the  top  of  hysterical 
peals  of  laughter.  "No!  I  was  se-se-serious!" 

[83] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


"  Then  what  have  I  done?"  he  cried.  "  What  have 
I  said?" 

She  was  too  hysterical  to  explain. 

"There  I  had  been,"  she  told  it,  "for  years  pur- 
sued by  these  ravenous  monsters,  men.  And  you've 
no  idea  what  a  nuisance  they  are  to  an  actress. 
They  see  you  all  beautifully  made  up,  in  the  roman- 
tic stage  lights,  being  everything  sweet  and  noble 
and  heroic  that  a  playwright  can  make  a  woman 
out  to  be.  And,  of  course,  they  go  crazy  about  you 
— and  come  around  offering  to  leave  wife  and  family, 
and  home  and  mother,  and  business  and  good  name 
for  you — and  threatening  to  throw  themselves  into 
the  Hudson  if  you  don't  instantly  throw  yourself 
into  their  arms.  Why!  They'd  plagued  me  like 
a  lot  of  wolves!  The  maiden  pursued!  And  here, 
now,  when  I  turned  on  the  most  ferocious  one  of 
them  all —  And  you've  no  idea  what  a  scene  he'd 
treated  me  to  only  the  day  before —  And  when 
I  turned  on  him  and  said,  'Well,  take  me,  then! 
Here  I  am!  Take  me!'  he  began  to  make  excuses. 
Funny!  I  laughed  so  hard  I  nearly  fainted  from 
exhaustion." 

He  grew  more  and  more  angry.  He  stormed  and 
swore.  She  could  only  stammer,  "It's — it's  so 
funny !"  And  at  last  he  stamped  out  of  the  house, 
enraged,  humiliated.  "And  he'll  never  come  back," 
she  said.  "Never.  Because  he  knows  that  if  he 
ever  does  come  back,  I'll  never  be  able  to  look  at 
him  with  a  straight  face." 

[84] 


JANE    SHORE 


And  some  of  that  perhaps  explains  one  thing 
that  seems  to  have  greatly  intrigued  her  public. 
It  explains  why  Jane  Shore  has  never  married. 
Her  suitors,  she  thinks,  have  not  been  in  love  with 
her;  they  have  been  in  love  with  Shakespeare's 
Juliet,  or  Shaw's  Patricia  Beauchamp,  or  Barrie's 
Grizel,  or  some  other  ideal  that  is  not  Fanny  Wid- 
gen.  And  they  bore  her.  She  will  not  marry  an 
actor.  "I  won't  marry  one,"  she  says,  "for  the  same 
reason  that  I  won't  co-star  with  one.  There  isn't 
room  for  two  of  our  egos  in  one  house."  A  manager 
wanted  to  marry  her,  and  she  explained  her  rejec- 
tion of  him  by  saying  in  a  Bowery  voice,  "I'm  not 
goin'  to  be  no  man's  white  slave."  The  fact  is  she 
will  probably  end  by  marrying  Fritz  Hoff  (now 
Hoffman),  the  property-man  who  blacked  the  star's 
other  eye  for  her  in  Atlantic  City. 

He  has  served  her  like  an  adoring  watchdog  ever 
since  that  first  defense  of  her.  He  was  her  property- 
man  and  stage  manager  in  her  first  success.  It 
was  his  skill  as  a  stage  carpenter  that  made  her 
house  so  deliciously  picturesque  and  theatrical  with 
its  window-seats  and  diamond  panes  and  Belasco 
lights  and  Juliet  hangings.  He  went  with  her  when 
the  most  famous  of  her  managers  took  her,  and  it 
was  about  Fritz  that  they  had  their  famous  quar- 
rel, I  understand.  I  know  nothing  about  it.  All 
I  know  is  that  after  her  last  performance  under 
that  management  I  asked  her,  "Well,  how  do  you 
feel  about  it  now?"  And  she  answered,  "Feel!" 

185] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


— raising  her  arms  to  draw  a  long  breath — "I  feel 
like  a  wax  figure  escaped  from  the  Eden  Muse"e." 

Fritz  became  her  personal  manager,  watched 
the  men  in  the  box-office  like  a  prison  guard,  ex- 
ercised her  bad-tempered  little  Pekinese,  tacked 
up  dodgers  for  her  in  prohibited  places,  quarreled 
with  her  company  for  her,  accepted  summonses 
for  bills  he  would  not  let  her  pay,  let  her  scold  and 
rage  at  him  serenely  whenever  anything  went  wrong 
for  which  he  was  not  responsible,  and  stood  out 
across  the  street  from  the  theater  and  enjoyed  the 
glory  of  his  name  hi  electric  lights  over  hers  as  his 
only  apparent  reward. 

It  is  Fritz  Hoffman  who  has  made  possible  her 
whole  later  career.  She  will  probably  marry  him. 
She  will  have  to  if  he  has  ever  sense  enough  to  say, 
"I'll  leave  you,  if  you  don't."  And  in  the  purely 
practical  world  in  which  Jane  Shore  has  to  live — 
the  world  of  the  theater — it  would  be  the  best 
thing  that  she  could  do. 


FROM  THE   LIFE 

Thomas  Wales  Warren 


THOMAS  WALES  WARREN 


WARREN,  Thomas  Wales,  jurist;  b. 
Columbus,  O.,  Feb.  21, 1851 ;  s.  John  and 
Esther  (McCabe)  W.;  ed.  pub.  schools, 
Univ.  Law  School;  read  law  in  office 
Judge  Stephen  Wales;  admitted  to  bar 
of  Ohio,  1880;  m.  Virginia  Wale?,  June 
10, 1881 ;  member  firm  of  Wales  &  War- 
ren, 1880-92.  Active  in  politics;  twice 
deleg.  Rep.  Nat.  convs;  mem.  Rep.  Nat. 
Exec.  Com.,  1890-1902;  state  Attorney- 
General;  Attorney-General  of  U.  S.; 
Secretary  of  State;  justice  Supreme 
Court  of  U.  S.,  etc.— Who's  Who. 


FOR  the  purposes  of  this  portrait-study  let  us 
take  Warren  before  he  was  Justice  Thomas 
Wales  Warren  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States.  Let  us  take  him  before  he  was  even  Thomas 
W.  W7arren,  United  States  Attorney-General  and 
"Warwick  the  Kingmaker"  at  Washington.  Let 
us  take  him  when  he  was  still  "Tom"  Warren, 
Attorney-General  ef  his  native  state,  unknown  to 
the  national  cartoonists,  engaged  obscurely  in  local 
politics,  and  foreseeing  his  conspicuous  future  as 
little  as  a  man  foresees  the  view  from  the  top  of  a 
hill  which  he  is  still  climbing.  And  let  us  take  him 
on  the  day  when  he  suddenly  decided  that  he  would 
not  follow  the  usual  road  to  that  hilltop,  but  make 

[89] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


an  adventurous  short  cut  to  it  over  the  most  ob- 
vious obstructions. 

That  day  was  a  Sunday  and  a  hot  July  Sunday, 
but  people  have  to  be  governed  seven  days  in  the 
week,  and  Warren  was  at  his  library  desk.  There 
is  no  need  to  describe  him,  because  he  had  already 
the  rather  repellant  features  that  have  since  be- 
come so  familiar  to  the  American  public.  But  I 
should  like  to  explain  that  some  of  his  features 
quite  belied  him. 

He  had  already  begun  to  achieve  his  resemblance 
to  a  mummy,  with  Pharaoh's  bony  nose.  He  looked 
parched  and  his  skin  was  dry  and  leathery.  But 
that  was  not  an  indication  of  any  moral  evil.  It 
was  due  to  indigestion.  Poverty  had  ruined  his 
stomach  in  his  youth. 

He  had  also  the  deep  furrow  between  his  eye- 
brows which  the  caricaturists  have  made  so  sinister, 
but  it  was  not  really  sinister.  In  its  origin  it  was  a 
harmless  pretension.  He  had  contracted  it  at  law- 
school,  listening  to  lectures  with  an  intense  young 
expression  of  attention  that  had  been  designed  to 
impress  the  lecturer.  He  had  long  since  ceased 
trying  to  impress  any  one.  Quite  the  opposite. 
When  he  was  most  attentive,  now,  he  looked  most 
absent-minded. 

And  he  had  the  weasel-mouthed  weak  look  which 
the  cartoonists  exaggerate,  but  if  you  could  have 
drawn  back  his  lips  to  bare  his  teeth,  you  would 
have  found  that  his  lower  jaw  closed  up  inside  the 

[90] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

upper  one,  almost  to  the  palate.  And  that  was  a 
malformation  of  the  mouth  which  he  had  unwit- 
tingly forced  upon  himself  in  the  struggles  of  his 
ambitious  boyhood,  when  he  had  lived  with  his 
jaws  clenched — literally — dramatizing  to  himself 
his  wrestle  with  adversity,  consciously  assuming  a 
pose  of  determination  to  succeed,  and  biting  his 
jaws  together  as  if  he  were  fighting  physically 
while  he  studied;  or  when  he  was  threshing  around 
his  unheated  room  at  night  trying  to  get  warm  be- 
fore he  went  to  bed;  or,  in  later  years,  when  he 
was  facing  any  opposition  to  his  advancement.  It 
was  not  a  weakness  in  his  mouth;  it  was  rather  a 
pathetic  sort  of  strength.  It  showed,  now,  chiefly 
when  he  confronted  any  serious  problem  of  policy 
that  had  to  be  grappled  with  in  the  secrecy  of  his 
private  sessions  with  himself. 

He  was  already  growing  bald,  but  he  wore  a 
toupee.  This  toupee  he  had  taken  off  because  he 
was  hot,  and  it  lay  on  his  desk  blotter  before  him, 
like  the  scalp  of  an  enemy.  He  was  apparently 
studying  it,  crouched  forward  on  the  arms  of  his 
desk  chair,  with  his  hands  clasped  in  a  loose  en- 
tanglement of  his  long  fingers.  And  his  tight 
little  skull  shone  with  the  gloss  of  a  coffee-colored 
ostrich-egg  in  the  warm  gloom  of  his  old-fashioned 
library. 

The  windows  were  covered  with  Venetian  blinds 
that  showed  between  their  slats  the  green  glow 
of  locust-trees  and  sunlight  outside  on  his  lawn. 

[91] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


There  he  was,  then — Tom  Warren,  about  to 
cross  the  Rubicon!  A  historical  moment!  Fraught, 
as  the  historians  say,  with  mighty  consequences. 


If  you  could  have  put  your  face  down  between 
him  and  his  toupee,  you  would  have  seen  that  his 
eyes  were  focused  on  nothing  nearer  than  the 
center  of  the  earth.  He  was  concentrated  on  an 
invisible  perplexity.  And  his  problem  was  this: 
A  county  sheriff  in  the  town  of  Middleburg,  in  the 
southern  extremity  of  the  state,  had  telephoned 
to  the  Governor  that  the  farmers  of  the  district  were 
arming  to  come  in  to  Middleburg,  that  night,  to 
break  open  the  jail  and  lynch  some  negroes.  The 
Governor  was  out  of  the  state,  on  his  way  east  to 
a  political  conference,  and  the  sheriff's  warning 
had  been  sent  to  Warren  from  the  State-house. 
Warren,  having  elected  the  Governor  on  a  law- 
enforcement  platform,  was  busy  with  a  campaign 
to  have  him  nominated  for  the  Presidency,  with 
the  reversion  to  himself  of  a  place  in  the  Cabinet. 
Middleburg  was  the  Governor's  home  town,  and  a 
lynching  there  might  be  used  by  his  political  en- 
emies and  his  party  rivals  to  give  him  "a  black 
eye"  nationally. 

How?  Well,  if  the  Governor  was  to  show  him- 
self a  man  of  conspicuous  strength  before  the  na- 
tion, he  would  either  have  to  prevent  the  lynching 
with  armed  force — and  perhaps  kill  some  of  the 

[92] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

embattled  farmers  of  the  county — or  he  would 
have  to  make  a  grand-stand  play  of  prosecuting 
the  lynchers  vigorously  after  the  event.  And  by 
either  act  he  might  alienate  the  support  of  his 
home  district,  for  it  was  far  enough  South  to  be 
on  the  border  of  parts  where  the  white  voter  ad- 
ministered lynch  law  as  an  extra-judicial  form  of 
law  enforcement  against  the  black;  and  the  solid 
South  might  even  be  persuaded  to  turn  solidly 
against  the  Governor  as  a  nigger-sympathizer  who 
was  playing  for  the  Jim  Crow  vote. 

Some  one  once  asked  Warren,  "How  did  you 
ever  think  of  that?"  when  he  had  outwitted  a 
threatening  situation  instantly,  without  a  moment's 
pause  of  hesitation.  Warren  replied:  "You  don't 
have  time  to  think.  It  has  to  be  there — or  you 
can't  do  it."  And,  in  this  case,  he  remained  staring 
at  his  problem — through  his  toupee  and  his  desk 
blotter — a  much  briefer  time  than  it  has  taken 
you  to  read  of  his  doing  it,  unless  you  have  skipped. 

He  pressed  a  call-button  to  summon  his  secre- 
tary, put  on  his  toupee,  and  began  to  walk  up  and 
down  his  library  with  the  long,  slow  strides  of  a 
wading-bird.  As  he  walked  his  mouth  relaxed 
into  a  sort  of  pout  of  dreamy  satisfaction,  and  he 
played  with  a  loose  button  on  his  coat,  sliding  his 
thumb  under  it  and  around  it  incessantly  while 
he  mused. 

That  unconscious  habit,  and  the  protrusion  of 
the  lips  which  accompanied  it,  had  an  illuminating 

[93] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


origin.  His  mother  had  died  of  privations  and 
malnutrition  before  he  had  been  weaned.  His 
spinster  aunt,  a  dressmaker,  had  raised  him  from 
infancy;  and  his  only  "comforter"  had  been  a 
bone  button  sewed  on  a  rag.  It  had  been  on  a 
button  that  he  had  cut  his  teeth.  Even  as  a  grow- 
ing boy  he  had  gone  to  sleep  sucking  a  button  on 
his  night-shirt — secretly,  of  course.  And  there  was 
still,  for  the  Attorney-General,  the  satisfaction  of 
a  repressed  instinct  in  this  button  play,  although 
he  was  ignorant  of  the  reason  for  it  or  the  origin 
of  it. 

He  stopped  it  as  soon  as  he  heard  his  secretary 
at  his  door,  and,  turning,  he  stood  in  the  center  of 
the  room  and  watched  the  young  man  enter. 

It  was  characteristic  of  Warren  so  to  turn  alertly 
to  any  new-comer,  and  it  was  characteristic  of  him 
to  regard  even  Pritchard  with  a  mechanical  habit 
of  scrutiny  as  he  regarded  every  one  who  came  to 
interview  him.  He  used  to  say  that  he  could  tell 
if  a  man  was  going  to  lie  to  him  by  the  way  he 
crossed  the  room.  And  he  was  aware  at  once — 
though  his  mind  was  on  another  matter — that 
there  was  something  not  quite  right  about  the  boy. 

To  the  casual  glance  Pritchard  was  merely  a 
good-looking  youth  with  smooth  black  hair  that 
may  have  been  pomaded,  a  small  black  mustache 
that  looked  petted,  long  black  eyelashes,  a  dimpled, 
plump  chin,  and  a  dark  mole  on  his  cheek  that 
touched  off  his  girlish  complexion  like  a  beauty 

[94] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

patch.  He  was  somewhat  flushed.  As  soon  as 
he  came  in  the  door  Warren  said,  abstractedly, 
"Shut  that,  will  you?" 

Pritchard,  as  he  closed  it,  turned  his  back  to 
Warren,  looking  down  at  the  handle. 

Ordinarily  he  would  have  closed  the  door  with 
a  hand  behind  him,  his  eyes  on  Warren  inquiringly. 
Warren  noticed  something  unnatural  in  this  dif- 
ference, without  really  formulating  what  the  dif- 
ference was.  He  had  already  observed  that 
Pritchard  was  in  high  color. 

"Get  your  note-book,"  Warren  said  in  the  same 
thoughtful  tone,  "and  take  this  down." 

Pritchard  went  to  the  desk,  found  his  note-book, 
sat  down  in  his  usual  chair  beside  the  desk,  and 
prepared  himself  to  take  dictation.  He  looked  at 
his  hands  a  moment,  waiting.  And  then,  looking 
up  quickly  at  Warren,  he  watched  the  Attorney- 
General  and,  at  the  same  time,  furtively  turned  a 
ring  on  his  finger  so  as  to  conceal  the  setting. 

Warren  was  apparently  not  noticing.  He  was 
gazing  meditatively  ahead  of  him.  But  he  saw 
Pritchard's  action  with  the  ring  out  of  the  corner 
of  his  eye. 

If  he  had  expressed  the  matter  to  himself — whicli 
he  did  not — he  would  have  concluded:  "This  boy 
feels  guilty  toward  me.  He  has  something  to  con- 
ceal from  me.  It's  connected  with  a  ring,  which 
he  doesn't  wish  me  to  recognize.  He's  wearing 
that  ring  instead  of  his  seal  ring.  He  has  probably 

[95] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


changed  rings  with  some  one,  and  he  doesn't  want 
me  to  know  it.  Why?" 

He  said  to  Pritchard,  still  thoughtful:  "One  of 
our  detectives,  Ben  Teague,  is  down  in  Middleburg 
on  a  case.  He's  probably  at  the  Mansion  House 
there.  Under  the  name  of  Bert  Todd.  Make  a 
note  of  it:  'Bert  Todd/  I  want  to  get  a  message 
to  him  without  disturbing  his  cover.  Understand?" 

"Yes,  sir." 

"  Well.  Go  out  to  a  telephone-booth — in  the  Hoi- 
man  Hotel — and  get  him  on  the  wire.  Bert  Todd. 
Representing  the  Consolidated  Farm  Implement 
Company.  Say  to  him —  Take  this  down:  *I 
have  some  confidential  information  to  give  you, 
on  behalf  of  the  president  of  the  company,  who  is 
temporarily  out  of  the  state.  And  I  cannot  give 
it  explicitly  over  the  telephone.'"  (He  was  dic- 
tating in  the  tone  of  a  business  communication.) 
"'The  counsel  of  our  company  has  just  received 
this  information  from  an  officer  of  the  company 
whose  name  is  Steinholtz — the  same  name  as  the 
sheriff  of  your  county  there.  He  informs  us  that 
a  competitor  by  the  name  of  Lynch  is  likely  to 
make  trouble  for  us  in  his  district.  You  under- 
stand it's  the  president's  home  district,  and  any 
such  disturbance  of  our  prestige  in  that  locality 
might  seriously  affect  the  re-election  of  the  com- 
pany's present  management  by  the  stockholders. 
It  is  therefore  imperative  that  Mr.  Lynch  shall 
be  headed  off. 

[96] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

'"Mr.  Steinholtz  has  asked  us  for  assistance. 
You  must  make  arrangements  to  see  him  at  once. 
Instantly.  There's  not  a  moment  to  lose.  As  soon 
as  you  have  seen  him,  'phone,  on  his  private  office 
wire,  to  our  head  law-office.  Our  lawyer  will  be 
there  till  you  report.  He'll  be  there  all  night  if 
necessary.  You  understand  the  importance  of  it. 
The  company  depends  on  you.' 

"That's  all.    Now,  read  that  over  to  me." 

Pritchard  read  it,  monotonously,  following  the 
lines  of  shorthand  with  his  pencil.  Warren  studied 
the  thin  gold  band  of  the  ring  on  the  young  man's 
finger.  He  had,  of  course  already  begun  to  suspect 
that  the  ring  belonged  to  his  daughter  Meta. 

When  the  reading  was  finished  he  said:  "All 
right,  Will.  Go  ahead,  now.  I'll  be  at  the  State- 
house.  I'll  'phone  here  for  you,  if  I  want  you." 

Pritchard  hurried  out,  with  eager  alacrity.  War- 
ren sat  and  considered  him — and  Meta. 

3 

Warren,  as  an  orphaned  boy,  inadequately  sup- 
ported by  an  underpaid  sewing-woman,  had  gone 
on  the  streets  to  "mooch"  and  sell  newspapers 
as  soon  as  he  was  old  enough  to  walk.  By  working 
after  school-hours,  delivering  newspapers,  running 
errands,  doing  odd  furnace  jobs  at  night,  and  gen- 
erally foraging  like  a  stray  cat,  he  had  contrived 
to  get  an  elementary  public-school  education.  Then 
at  the  age  of  twelve  he  had  gone  to  work  as  an 

[97] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


office-boy  for  Judge  Stephen  Wales,  and  the  judge 
in  the  end  had  practically  adopted  him.  (Hence 
the  "Wales"  in  "Thomas  Wales  Warren.")  He 
sent  Warren  to  law-school.  He  took  him  as  a 
partner  in  his  office.  He  even  accepted  him  as  a 
son-in-law,  proud  of  the  boy  and  his  ability.  And 
when  the  judge  died  Warren  and  his  wife  were 
already  living  in  the  old  Wales  home  as  the  accepted 
heirs  of  it. 

This  was  Judge  Wales's  library  in  which  Warren 
now  sat,  thinking.  It  was  Judge  Wales's  grand- 
daughter Meta  of  whom  he  was  sitting  there  to 
think.  And  she  was  much  more  the  judge's  grand- 
daughter to  Warren  than  she  was  his  own  child. 
She  looked  like  a  Wales.  She  spoke  and  moved 
like  a  Wales.  She  had  all  the  high,  impractical 
ideals  of  a  Wales.  And  Warren  felt,  before  her,  the 
same  class  inferiority  that  he  had  felt  with  her 
dead  mother. 

He  had  always  been,  in  his  own  mind,  Tommy 
the  office-boy  to  the  judge's  daughter;  and  still, 
subconsciously,  with  the  judge's  granddaughter, 
he  was  Tommy  the  office-boy  grown  old.  It  was 
some  sort  of  arrested  immaturity  hi  him — like  his 
playing  with  the  button.  Neither  the  mother  nor 
the  daughter  had  ever  suspected  it.  They  had 
never  suspected,  when  they  looked  at  Tom  Warren, 
that  they  were  not  looking  at  a  husband  or  a  father, 
but  at  a  devoted,  adoring,  confidential  servant, 
who  understood  them  affectionately  and  protected 

[98] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

them  shrewdly  from  the  predatory  world  to  which 
he  belonged — the  world  that  would  have  destroyed 
Judge  Wales  and  his  fine  old  benevolence  and  his 
unworldly  idealism,  if  Warren  had  not  defended 
him. 

Warren  had  now  to  defend  the  judge's  grand- 
daughter. That  was  how  he  saw  the  situation  and 
his  duty  in  it.  He  had  nothing  against  Pritchard 
— except  that  he  was  a  subservient,  inoffensive, 
secretarial  valet  who  would  never  be  anything  else. 
He  considered  that  Pritchard  was  no  man  to  take 
care  of  a  gentle  girl  and  protect  her  children  from 
the  dangers  of  a  cruelly  competitive  social  system. 
If  it  was  she  who  had  given  Pritchard  the  ring — 

He  first  arranged  the  necessary  machinery  for 
finding  that  out.  He  removed  a  paper-fastener 
from  the  corner  of  a  typewritten  report,  put  a  box 
of  cigars  on  the  edge  of  his  desk-top,  and  laid  the 
loose  sheets  of  the  report  on  the  box.  Then  he  went 
to  his  door  and  called,  "Meta!" 

She  answered  from  the  front  room.  He  returned 
to  his  desk  and  began  to  gather  up  some  papers. 

She  came  to  the  door  and  stood  there,  not  quite 
smiling,  but  with  the  happy  recollection  of  an  in- 
terrupted smile  still  lingering  in  her  face.  She  was 
of  the  type  of  dark  Southern  beauty  that  matures 
young,  but  she  was  still  girlish,  and  she  waited  in  a 
girlish  attitude,  with  her  hands  clasped  behind  her. 

He  said,  looking  for  something  in  his  desk: 
"Tell  Fred  to  bring  the  car  around.  I  have  to  go 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


to  the  State-house.  They're  having  trouble  down 
at  Middleburg,  and  I'll  have  to  handle  it  in  the 
Governor's  absence.  I'm  afraid  I'll  not  be  back 
till  late." 

"Yes,"  she  said. 

He  had  reached  out  as  if  to  open  the  cigar-box. 
He  upset  the  typewritten  pages.  They  slid  with  a 
rustle  to  the  floor  and  scattered  widely — assisted 
by  his  clumsy  effort  to  catch  them.  "There!"  he 
said,  disgustedly. 

"Let  me,  father."  She  crossed  the  room  with  a 
graceful  quickness  and  knelt  among  the  papers  in 
a  whorl  of  white  skirts.  He  looked  down  at  her 
hands  as  she  gathered  up  the  pages,  and  he  saw 
that  her  ring  was  gone — a  little  single-ruby  ring 
that  her  dead  mother  had  given  her. 

He  began  at  once  to  maneuver  against  that 
conspiracy  of  events  as  he  had  begun  to  maneuver 
against  the  menace  from  Middleburg.  And  his 
tactics  in  these  two  cases  were  typical  of  the  man 
and  his  methods.  They  can  be  more  briefly  re- 
ported and  more  readily  understood  than  the  more 
complicated  intrigues  of  some  of  his  national  manip- 
ulations, but  they  were  just  as  astute  and  subtle 
in  miniature  as  any  of  his  later  strategies  have  been 
in  the  large. 

4 

"I'm  growing  old,"  he  said.  "It  makes  me  dizzy 
to  stoop."  He  began  to  pace  up  and  down  the  room 

[1001 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

rather  dejectedly.  "And  I'm  working  too  hard. 
At  thankless  work.  People  don't  know  how  to 
govern  themselves,  but  they  revolt  against  any  man 
who  tries*  to  govern  them.  You  have  to  do  it  with- 
out letting  them  know  you're  doing  it.  That's 
what  makes  our  politics  so  hypocritical." 

He  may  have  believed  that,  or  he  may  not;  he 
was  not  considering  the  truth  of  what  he  said,  but 
its  effect  on  her.  He  asked,  as  if  casually,  the  ques- 
tion to  which  he  had  been  leading:  "Did  you  read 
the  attack  that  this  man  Miller  is  making  on  me? 
'Wardrobe'  Miller." 

"Yes,  father,"  she  confessed.  He  never  dis- 
cussed politics  with  her.  She  felt — as  he  intended 
her  to  feel — that  he  was  appealing  to  her  for  a 
sympathetic  understanding.  She  did  not  quite 
know  how  to  give  it. 

"Well,"  he  said,  cheerfully,  "Miller's  turn  will 
come.  He'll  satisfy  them  for  a  time  with  this  pre- 
tense of  'letting  the  people  rule* — with  their  direct 
primaries,  and  their  initiative,  and  their  referendum, 
and  all  the  rest  of  it.  But  there  has  to  be  a  captain 
to  the  ship;  and  as  soon  as  they  find  out  that 
Miller's  the  captain  they'll  mutiny  against  him, 
too,  and  throw  him  overboard." 

"Are  they  going  to  defeat  you?"  she  asked,  dis- 
tressed. 

"No,"  he  said.  "Not  this  time,  I  think.  But 
they  believe  they're  going  to  do  it.  And  the  para- 
sites are  beginning  to  desert  me  already  and  fasten 

[101] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


themselves  on  Miller."  And  that  last  was  the  sig- 
nificant statement  to  which  all  his  preamble  had 
been  directed. 

"It  isn't  pretty,  is  it?"  she  said.  She  had  put 
back  the  loose  sheets  of  typewritten  manuscript  on 
his  desk,  and  she  stood  looking  at  him  with  a  wistful 
desire  to  aid  him  showing  in  her  large  eyes,. 

"It's  a  strange  business,"  he  went  on  as  if 
philosophizing  idly,  walking  up  and  down.  "When 
I  first  came  into  office,  before  you  were  old  enough 
to  remember — at  the  head  of  a  reform  movement 
— of  business  men — we  turned  out  the  thieving 
politicians  and  professional  officeholders  who  were 
looting  the  treasury,  and  we  put  them  in  jail — many 
of  them.  And  I  was  a  popular  hero.  Your  mother 
was  very  proud  that  day. 

"And  now  they're  in  revolt  against  our  *  business 
administration.'  They  can't  say  we've  not  been 
honest.  We've  given  them  good  government.  And 
the  state's  been  prosperous.  But  it's  labor  that 
wants  to  rule,  now,  and  the  working-man.  And 
they  say  I  represent  business  and  the  corporations 
and  the  trusts. 

"It  all  amounts  to  this:  A  man  is  born  with 
the  ability  to  rule  as  he's  born  with  any  other 
ability.  It  happens  that,  during  his  life,  some  one 
class  is  governing,  and  he  governs  for  them.  Then 
another  class  surges  up,  with  a  new  ruler.  And 
then  another.  But  the  people  never  govern.  They 
can't,  any  more  than  an  army  can  command  and 

[102] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

direct  itself.  They're  always  killing  one  king  to 
put  his  crown  on  another.  Yesterday  it  was  King 
Birth.  To-day  it's  King  Money.  To-morrow  it 
will  be  King  Labor." 

He  may  have  believed  that,  too,  or  he  may 
not.  He  was  saying  it  with  a  purpose,  not  with 
a  belief. 

He  smiled  at  her.  "Well,  I'll  soon  be  out  of  it  all, 
I  hope,  and  begin  to  live  like  a  human  being.  I 
haven't  had  any  life — home  life  or  any  other.  I'm 
going  to  get  a  holiday.  How  would  you  like  to  go 
to  Washington  with  me?" 

"  Oh,  I'd  like  it,"  she  said.  Then  her  face  changed. 
She  looked  down  at  her  hands.  She  hesitated. 
And  he  was  afraid  she  was  going  to  confess  her 
affair  with  Pritchard. 

"Well,"  he  put  in,  hastily,  "run  along  and  call 
the  car.  They're  probably  preparing  their  riot  in 
Middleburg  while  I  chatter.  That's  a  very  becom- 
ing dress." 

"Do  you  like  it?" 

"I  like  it  very  much,  my  dear,"  he  said,  "and 
I  like  you  in  it." 

"Thank  you,  father,"  she  said,  shyly.  She  went 
out  in  a  little  flutter  of  pleased  embarrassment.  He 
put  the  typewritten  report  in  his  pocket.  It  was  a 
summary  of  all  the  direct-primary  laws  that  had 
been  passed  in  the  Western  States  and  of  the  court 
decisions  that  had  confirmed  or  voided  those  en- 
actments. 

8  [103] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


He  stood  a  moment  in  deep  thought.  The  girl, 
certainly,  was  not  out  of  his  reach,  and  he  had  given 
her  mind  an  impulse  in  the  direction  that  he  wanted 
it  to  take.  He  could  manage  her  if  he  could  manage 
Pritchard. 

He  shut  his  door  noiselessly.  He  sat  down  to 
his  desk  'phone  and  called  a  private  number.  "Is 
that  you,  Robert?"  he  asked,  in  a  low  voice.  "Know 
who's  speaking?  It's  Tom  Warren.  Can  you  come 
at  once  to  my  office  in  the  State-house?  The  side 
entrance  will  be  open.  And  my  private  door. 
I'll  be  alone.  .  .  .  Yes,  right  away,  if  you  can.  I'm 
going  right  down.  ...  I  have  a  personal  favor  to 
ask Yes.  Thanks." 

He  hung  up  the  receiver  with  a  quick  click. 
The  man  with  whom  he  had  been  speaking  was 
Robert  Wardrup  Miller— the  "Wardrobe"  Miller 
of  whose  attacks  upon  him  he  had  spoken  to  his 
daughter — the  Miller  to  whom  the  "parasites," 
as  he  had  said,  were  already  beginning  to  attach 
themselves. 

He  went  out  to  the  hall.  She  brought  him  his 
soft  felt  hat.  He  bent  to  give  her  his  usual  per- 
functory kiss;  but  she  wished  to  show  her  loyal 
sympathy  with  him  in  the  worries  of  political  life 
and  the  defections  of  the  parasitical,  and,  instead 
of  turning  her  cheek,  she  took  the  caress  full  on 
her  lips,  as  if  it  had  been  her  lover's,  avidly.  War- 
ren understood  that  Pritchard  had  been  kissing 
her.  She  smiled  up  at  him,  and  it  was  the  assured 

[104] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

smile  of  a  girl  whose  ears  were  full  of  her  lover's 
praises  of  her. 

"Good-by,"  he  said.    "I'll  'phone  you." 


He  hurried  to  his  automobile.  "The  State-house, 
Fred,"  he  directed  his  chauffeur. 

The  chauffeur  nodded  in  the  informal  friendly 
manner  of  Warren's  servants.  They  always  liked 
him  and  served  him  and  were  proud  of  him.  In 
fact,  his  ability  to  obtain  loyal  and  righteous  sup- 
port was  one  of  the  significant  attributes  of  "the 
most  sinister  figure  in  our  national  life,"  as  one  of 
his  political  opponents  afterward  acclaimed  him. 

It  was  necessary,  perhaps,  for  him  to  have  such 
an  atmosphere  of  friendliness  and  private  credit 
in  which  to  live.  At  any  rate,  he  had  an  instinct 
for  obtaining  it.  He  played  politics  as  a  club 
gambler  plays  poker,  sociably,  with  a  sympathetic 
geniality,  winning  by  any  means,  without  a  scruple, 
but  always  as  if  he  were  more  interested  in  his  op- 
ponents than  he  was  in  his  own  play.  It  was  char- 
acteristic of  him  that  he  would  not  openly  interfere 
between  Pritchard  and  his  daughter,  as  he  would 
not  openly  interfere  between  the  people  and  their 
desire  for  the  direct  primary,  the  initiative,  the 
referendum,  and  the  other  reforms  proposed  by 
the  Direct  Legislation  League.  But  he  believed  as 
confidently  that  he  knew  what  was  best  for  the 
people  of  his  state  as  he  believed  that  he  knew  what 

[105] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


was  best  for  his  daughter.  He  believed  that  in 
either  case  it  was  unwise  to  arouse  opposition  by 
asserting  his  superior  wisdom.  And  he  moved 
against  Pritchard,  as  he  moved  against  "Wardrobe" 
Miller  and  his  Direct  Legislation  League,  secretly, 
without  showing  any  ill-will  and  without  exciting  any. 

When  the  "wild-eyed  reformers,  agitators,  and 
demagogues"  of  the  state  first  began  to  demand 
measures  of  direct  legislation — "in  order,"  as  they 
said,  "to  destroy  the  moneyed  control  of  political 
machines  and  make  the  elected  representatives  of 
the  community  responsible  to  the  electors" — War- 
ren had  watched  the  agitation  interestedly,  wonder- 
ing how  the  men  who  should  have  to  rule  in  the 
future  would  be  able  to  rule  over  a  people  equipped 
with  independent  lawmaking  powers  of  their  own. 
He  had  studied  it  as  one  might  study  a  chess  prob- 
lem with  a  dummy  for  opponent.  When  the  agi- 
tators organized  he  saw  the  problem  with  an  op- 
ponent sitting  behind  it.  He  had  arrived  at  no 
solution,  so  he  took  his  opponent  "into  camp." 
He  insinuated  machine  men  into  the  Direct  Legisla- 
tion League;  they  got  control  unostentatiously  of  the 
executive  committee,  and  the  League  nominated  for 
the  governorship  Mr.  Robert  Wardrup  Miller,  whom 
Warren  had  privately  chosen  for  that  empty  honor. 

Miller  had  accepted  his  nomination  in  good  faith. 
He  was  a  wealthy  young  idealist  who  had  become 
an  ardent  follower  of  a  national  leader  in  reform, 
and  he  knew  as  much  about  practical  politics  as 

[106] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

a  nun.  He  was  a  member  of  the  City  Club  to 
which  Warren  belonged,  and  it  was  Warren  who 
had  encouraged  him  to  enter  public  life.  "Mr. 
Warren,"  he  replied,  to  that  encouragement,  "if 
I  do,  I  shall  have  to  oppose  you."  And  WTarren 
said:  "Robert,  a  healthy  opposition  is  the  life  of 
party  politics.  Oppose  me  by  all  means,  and  I'll 
oppose  you.  I'll  enjoy  it,  and  it  will  be  a  good 
training  for  you." 

Miller  frowned  determinedly.  He  felt  that  he 
was  a  strong  character  asserting  his  independence 
and  compelling  even  Warren  to  bend  to  him  with 
assumed  jocularity.  When  he  was  nominated  by 
the  Direct  Legislation  League  he  defied  the  light- 
ning in  a  speech  in  which  he  named  Wrarren  as  the 
man  most  responsible  for  preventing  the  introduc- 
tion of  a  direct  primary  law  into  the  last  Legis- 
lature. And  now,  when  Warren  telephoned  to 
ask  him  to  come  to  the  State-house,  Miller  showed 
his  fearlessness — as  Warren  had  hoped  he  would — 
by  accepting  the  invitation  instantly. 

It  was  Warren,  by  the  way,  who  had  had  him 
nicknamed  "Wardrobe"  Miller  by  privately  start- 
ing the  story  that  Miller  had  three  hundred  and 
sixty-five  neckties  and  thirty-one  pairs  of  trousers 
in  the  clothes-closets  of  his  bachelor  apartments. 

6 

Warren  arrived  at  the  State-house,  passed  the 
doorkeeper  with  a  hasty  greeting,  and  climbed  the 

[107] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


flight  of  stairs  to  his  office  in  long  strides  of  two 
steps  at  a  time,  taking  out  his  keys  as  he  went.  His 
telephone  was  ringing  as  he  entered  his  private 
office.  He  caught  it  from  his  desk  and  said,  "Yes?" 

It  was  the  detective,  Teague,  in  Middleburg,  and 
he  was  calling  from  the  sheriff's  office,  where  he 
had  no  need  of  cover.  Warren's  face,  as  he  listened, 
settled  into  its  mask  of  concentrated  impassivity. 
He  sat  down. 

"I  see,"  he  kept  saying.  "I  see.  Yes.  I  see." 
He  cleared  his  throat.  "Are  the  Sunday-closing 
laws  enforced  in  Middleburg?  ...  I  thought  not. 
.  .  .  Those  saloons  along  the  river-front  will  be 
pretty  well  filled,  won't  they?  ...  I  see.  Well, 
Teague" — he  cleared  his  throat  again — "just  go 
down  to  those  joints,  get  together  all  the  roughs 
and  gunmen  you  can  find,  and  tell  them  that  a 
lot  of  Rubes  are  coming  in  to  Middleburg  to 
rough-house  the  town.  Understand?  Work  up 
their  natural  antagonism  to  the  hayseeds.  And  tell 
them  if  this  lynching  is  pulled  off  in  Middleburg 
we'll  have  to  start  a  campaign  of  law  enforcement 
that  '11  end  in  a  strict  closing  law  and  a  dry  Sunday. 
Do  you  get  me? 

"Well,  enlist  as  many  of  them  as  you  can,  and 
then  tell  the  sheriff  he's  to  swear  them  in  as  deputies. 
Post  them  around  the  outskirts,  with  orders  to 
arrest  every  farmer  they  see  coming  into  town — 
and  search  him — and  lock  him  up  if  he's  armed. 
Now  listen.  This  is  important:  You  have  to  do 

[108] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

this  on  your  own.  You  mustn't  mention  me,  or 
the  Governor,  or  any  orders  from  here.  Understand? 

"Yes.  .  .  .  Yes.  Report  to  me  whenever  you  can. 
It's  imperative  that  this  lynching  be  prevented. 
If  the  jail  won't  hold  them  all,  take  their  guns  away 
from  them  and  turn  them  loose — the  least  danger- 
ous-looking of  them.  .  .  .  Yes.  I'll  be  here.  All 
night  if  necessary.  ...  I  say,  I'll  be  here  all  night 
if  necessary.  Good-by." 

He  hung  up  the  receiver  hastily.  He  had  heard 
some  one  at  his  door.  He  took  his  typewritten  re- 
port from  his  pocket,  slipped  it  into  a  drawer,  an.d 
went  to  the  door,  looking  suddenly  worried.  When 
he  was  really  worried  he  showed  no  signs  of  it. 


"Well,  Robert,"  he  greeted  Miller,  holding  out 
his  hand,  "I'm  obliged  to  you  for  coming.  It's  a 
personal  matter.  I  won't  bore  you  with  politics. 
Sit  down." 

Miller  was  a  baldish  young  man  with  a  rather 
intense  flat  face.  He  was  well  dressed  in  light- 
gray  clothes  with  a  white  waistcoat.  His  mouth 
was  tightened  in  an  expression  of  solemnly  de- 
fensive self-importance.  "Anything  that  I  can  do," 
he  said,  "of  a  personal  nature" — and  he  emphasized 
the  word  "personal"  invidiously. 

"Yes,  yes,"  Warren  interrupted.  "I  knew  I 
could  rely  on  you.  It's  a  family  matter.  I  have  a 
daughter  Meta.  You  know  her,  I  think?" 

U09] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


Miller  said,  unnecessarily,  "A  charming  girl." 

"Exactly;  and  I  have  a  private  secretary  named 
Pritchard.  Know  him?" 

"I've  seen  him — when  he  came  to  the  club  for 
you." 

"I've  just  found  that  there's  practically  an  en- 
gagement between  them.  Without  my  consent 
or  my  knowledge.  They're  not  even  aware  that 
I've  heard  of  it  yet." 

Miller  looked  puzzled.  Warren  explained,  apolo- 
getically, "I  have  to  tell  you  this  in  order  to  account 
for  what  I'm  going  to  ask  you." 

He  had  begun  to  walk  up  and  down  the  room. 
Whenever  he  was  "finessing"  in  an  interview  he 
moved  about  hi  this  way  distractingly. 

"The  girl,"  he  said,  "has  her  mother's  spirit; 
and  if  I  oppose  her  I'm  afraid  I'll  drive  her  into 
his  arms.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  I'm  not  opposed  to 
her  marrying  any  honest  young  man — such  as 
Pritchard  seems  to  be — if  it  will  make  her  happy. 
But  Pritchard  has  no  prospects.  He's  a  clever 
stenographer  and  a  trustworthy  private  secretary, 
and  I  suppose  he  aspires  to  promotion  in  the  public 
service.  I  like  him.  I'd  be  glad  to  trust  my  daugh- 
ter's future  to  him  if  his  own  future  weren't  so 
uncertain." 

He  turned  abruptly.  He  said,  with  an  almost 
pathetic  paternal  distress,  "I  need  hardly  say 
that  this — is  altogether  confidential." 

"Oh,  surely,  surely,"  Miller  replied,  embarrassed. 
[no] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

Warren  continued  pacing  his  carpet.  "It's  his 
future.  That's  what  worries  me.  If  he  stays  with 
me  he'll  become  a  machine  politician — a  practical, 
professional  politician.  He'll  have  to  make  com- 
promises. Unless  he's  an  exceptionally  strong 
character  he'll  become  involved  in  things  that 
aren't — well,  pretty.  You  know  what  our  sort  of 
politics  means.  I  don't  want  my  daughter  to  marry 
that  sort  of  politician." 

He  sat  down  and  leaned  forward  on  his  desk 
to  look  the  ask  ished  Miller  straight  in  the  eyes. 
"The  future  is  vvi  Jh.  you  men.  We're  fighting  a  los- 
ing fight  here.  I  want  you  to  give  this  boy  a  chance 
with  you.  I  want  you  to  offer  him  a  place  as  stenog- 
rapher, either  for  the  League  or  for  you  personally. 
I'd  prefer  the  latter.  I  know  I  could  trust  him 
with  you.  I  haven't  so  much  faith  in  your  execu- 
tive committee;  I  know  some  of  those  men  of  old. 
But  try  him.  If  he's  not  what  I  think  he  is,  dis- 
charge him." 

Miller  began,  "Well,  Mr.  Warren—" 

"I  know  what  you're  going  to  say,"  Warren  in- 
terrupted, rising  again  to  walk.  "With  my  influence 
in  this  city  I  could  find  him  a  dozen  places  without 
imposing  on  you.  But  if  he  has  any  training  at  all 
it's  for  political  life.  And  if  he's  to  go  into  politics 
I  want  him  to  go  in  with  ideals  among  men  who 
have  ideals.  I'm  not  speaking  to  you  as  a  politician 
now,  you  understand,  but  as  a  father.  If  this  boy's 
to  have  my  daughter's  future  in  his  hands  I  want 

[ill] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


them  to  be  clean  hands.  I'd  be  willing  to  pay  his 
salary  while  he's  with  you.  ...  I  know.  I  know. 
That  couldn't  be  done  without  scandal.  I  don't 
propose  it —  And,  you  understand,  I  can't  appear 
in  the  matter  at  all.  I  can't  even  let  him  know 
that  I've  asked  this  of  you;  because  I  don't  want 
to  seem  to  interfere  in  their  love-affair  in  any  way. 
I  can't  let  my  daughter  know.  I  can't  tell  her  that 
I'm  aware  of  her  little  romance  without  saying 
either  'Yes'  or  'No*  to  it — which  I'm  not  prepared 
to  do." 

"Well,  Mr.  Warren,"  Miller  said,  "it  can  be 
easily  arranged,  I  think.  I  can  use  a  good  stenog- 
rapher. We're  rushed  with  work." 

The  Attorney-General  sat  down.  His  face  cleared 
with  relief.  "I  knew  I  could  depend  on  you.  You 
see,"  he  said,  smiling  benignly,  "I  may  be  too  much 
the  anxious  parent.  It  may  be  just  a  passing  boy- 
and-girl  fancy,  due  to  proximity.  And  if  it  is 
it  '11  solve  itself  if  we  separate  them.  That's 
another  reason  why  I  want  him  to  leave  me.  I'll 
miss  him.  He's  a  good  boy.  I've  confided  in  him." 
This  was  certainly  untrue.  His  smile  broadened 
playfully.  "I'm  putting  all  my  secrets  in  your 
hands,  Robert,  if  you  can  get  them  from  him." 

Miller  started  to  protest. 

"No,  no."  Warren  stopped  him.  "I'm  only 
joking,  of  course.  What  I  really  want  to  say  is 
this:  my  daughter  showed  a  disposition  to  tell  me 
of  her  engagement  this  morning.  That's  why  I 

[112] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

intruded  on  your  Sunday  afternoon.  I  want  the 
boy  to  go  before  she  tells  me.  Otherwise  it  would 
look  as  if  I  had  got  rid  of  him.  And  if  you'll  write 
him  a  letter  offering  him  the  position,  and  send  it 
here  by  messenger  this  afternoon,  you'll  help  me 
out  of  a  difficulty  that  has  worried  me  more  than  a 
campaign.  Will  you  do  it?" 

"If  you  wish  it." 

"My  dear  boy,  you  put  me  under  a  great  obliga- 
tion. I  daren't  keep  you  here  any  longer,  for  fear 
he  might  come  in  and  see  you.  It  makes  me  feel 
like  a  conspirator."  He  rose,  smiling.  "I  hope 
you'll  not  avoid  me  at  the  club,  now  that  we're 
political  enemies.  I  see  you're  giving  me  some  sharp 
raps.  I  wish  I  were  a  good  public  speaker;  I'd 
come  back  at  you." 

Miller  held  out  his  hand.  "Mr.  Warren,"  he 
said,  "I'm  free  to  confess  that  this  little  affair, 
this  afternoon,  has  given  me  a  better  opinion  of 
you  than  perhaps  I  had." 

Warren  patted  him  on  the  shoulder.  "It  hasn't 
changed  the  opinion  I  had  of  you,  Robert.  I'm  a 
pretty  good  judge  of  character.  Better,  perhaps, 
than  you  are."  He  added,  at  the  opened  door: 
"And  in  my  capacity  as  a  judge  of  character  let 
me  whisper  something:  'Keep  an  eye  on  your  ex- 
ecutive committee.'" 

Miller  lifted  an  eyebrow.    "I'm  watching  them." 

That  was  what  Warren  wished  to  know.  " Good!" 
he  said.  "Good-by  and  good  luck." 

[113J 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


When  he  had  closed  the  door  he  returned  to  his 
desk,  got  out  the  report  on  direct  primaries,  and 
began  at  once  to  read  it  with  methodical  and  patient 
care. 

8 

It  is  obviously  difficult  not  to  misrepresent 
Warren  in  this  matter.  He  had  to  get  rid  of 
Pritchard  or  allow  his  daughter  to  marry  badly. 
He  could  not  discharge  the  secretary  without  pre- 
cipitating a  crisis  which  he  wished  to  avoid.  It 
was  wiser  to  provide  Pritchard  with  a  better  place 
to  which  he  could  go.  True,  he  had  told  his  daugh- 
ter that  the  parasites  were  deserting  him  to  go  to 
Miller,  and  if  Pritchard  went  to  Miller  it  would 
certainly  outrage  the  girl's  ideal  of  loyalty.  But 
he  was  not  compelling  Pritchard  to  accept  Miller's 
offer.  He  was  leaving  that  to  the  boy's  own  choice. 
Pritchard  might  refuse  it.  He  might  endear  him- 
self to  the  girl  by  refusing  it.  He  might —  He 
might  do  many  things  if  he  were  not  what  Warren 
thought  he  was. 

The  success  of  the  whole  stratagem  depended — 
as  Warren's  success  usually  depended — upon  his 
insight  into  the  character  of  the  man  whom  he 
was  outwitting.  And  that  insight  was  so  accurate 
that  it  was,  I  think,  intuitive.  He  knew  where  to 
reach  a  man  as  the  wasp  knows  where  to  sting  a 
beetle  so  as  to  paralyze  a  nerve  center  that  nothing 
but  careful  dissection  under  a  microscope  would 

[114] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

seem  sufficient  to  locate.  He  had  never  dissected 
Pritchard,  and  it  is  scarcely  worth  while  to  do  it 
here;  but  to  that  well-dressed  and  good-looking 
young  "secretarial  valet"  the  offer  of  a  place  with 
the  rich  and  "classy"  "Wardrobe"  Miller  would 
be  a  flattery  and  a  temptation  hard  to  withstand. 

9 

As  soon  as  Miller's  letter  arrived  Warren  tele- 
phoned to  Pritchard,  put  the  letter  in  the  outer 
office,  and  returned  to  his  work.  Having  absorbed 
the  report  on  the  direct  primary,  he  was  engaged 
in  drawing  up  alternative  bills  to  be  introduced 
at  the  next  Legislature,  if  the  popular  demand  for 
a  direct  primary  became  too  clamorous.  One  of 
the  bills  provided  for  a  direct  primary  with  a  con- 
vention that  should  preserve  to  the  party  machines 
the  control  of  nominations.  The  other  was  a  direct 
primary  bill  that  would  surely  be  declared  un- 
constitutional by  the  courts  because  it  contained 
no  provision  to  prevent  Republicans  from  voting 
in  a  Democratic  primary,  or  vice  versa.  He  was 
making  drafts  of  these  two  bills  in  his  small,  neat 
handwriting — to  file  them  for  future  use — when  he 
heard  Pritchard  in  the  outer  office. 

He  listened. 

Pritchard  evidently  read  the  letter  over  several 
times.  Then  he  brought  it  in  hesitatingly.  "Here's 
a  funny  thing,"  he  said,  giving  it  to  Warren. 

The  Attorney-General  glanced  through  it.  "Well, 

[115] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


Will,"  he  said,  handing  it  back,  "I'll  be  sorry  to 
lose  you,  but  I  don't  want  to  stand  in  your  way, 
and  this  salary  is  much  higher — to  be  frank  with 
you — than  I  could  get  the  state  to  allow  me  for  a 
secretary." 

"It  isn't  the  salary,"  Pritchard  put  in. 

"No.  I  understand  that,  of  course,"  Warren 
said.  "But  the  salary  should  be  considered.  And 
added  to  the  greater  prospects  of  advancement — " 

"It's  the  idea,"  Pritchard  said,  "of  going  over  to 
Miller." 

Warren  looked  surprised.  "Miller?  Oh,  I  see. 
Yes.  I  see.  Of  course,  in  a  sense,  we  are  opposed 
to  each  other;  but  Mr.  Miller  is  a  man  whom  I 
greatly  respect,  though  we  differ  in  our  opinions 
of  what  is  wise  in  matters  of  public  policy.  And  I 
don't  suppose  for  a  moment  that  he  had  any  idea 
— or  thought  that  you  would  lend  yourself,  if  he 
had,  to  any  betrayal  of  confidence — " 

"No,  no.  I  didn't  mean  thaty"  Pritchard  cried 
in  confusion. 

Warren  glanced  at  his  watch.  "Have  you  con- 
sulted any  of  your  family?" 

"No-o." 

"You  should  talk  it  over  with  them.  They're 
the  ones  best  able  to  decide.  And  if  you  give  me 
twenty-four  hours*  notice,  I'll  have  Miss  Davis 
relieve  you  until  I  can  find  some  one  to  take  her 
place.  I'll  be  sorry  to  lose  you,  Will,"  he  said,  in 
the  tone  of  an  employer  accepting  a  resignation, 

[1161 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

"but  I've  long  felt  that  a  boy  of  your  abilities 
should  be  seeking  a  larger  field.  In  a  few  years 
you'll  be  thinking  of  marrying.  I  know,  of  course, 
that  it  can't  have  entered  your  mind  yet."  Pritchard 
flushed.  "You're  still  too  young — and  unable  to 
support  a  wife.  But  you  must  prepare  for  such 
things  while  there's  time,  so  as  not  to  be  taken 
unawares.  To  marry  such  a  girl  as  a  boy  of  your 
character  would  naturally  aspire  to  you'll  have  to 
be  something  more  than  a  stenographer."  He  was 
reaching  for  his  pen.  "I'll  be  here  late,  but  you 
needn't  come  back.  I'll  see  you  in  the  morning." 

Pritchard  folded  and  refolded  the  letter.  "Well," 
he  said  at  last. 

"And  put  the  catch  on  the  door  as  you  go  out," 
Warren  dismissed  him. 

10 

He  knew  that  if  Pritchard  consulted  his  family 
they  would  use  every  argument  to  persuade  him 
to  accept  the  higher  salary.  He  knew  also  that 
Pritchard  would  have  to  go  home  to  dinner  before 
he  saw  Meta.  That  is  what  he  had  been  calculating 
when  he  glanced  at  his  watch  before  asking,  "Have 
you  consulted  your  family?"  And  if  he  was  prac- 
tising some  duplicity,  he  had  the  excuse  that 
Pritchard  had  begun  that  game. 

He  went  back  to  his  work  on  the  direct  primary 
bills.  Every  now  and  then  he  was  interrupted  by 
messages  from  Teague,  the  detective,  who  'phoned 

[1171 


to  report  progress.  The  roughs  of  Middleburg  had 
enlisted  under  the  sheriff  eagerly.  "Say,  Ben," 
Warren  asked,  "how  about  that  river-front  gang 
that  you've  been  after?  You  know  them  when  you 
see  them,  don't  you?  .  .  .  Then  why  can't  you 
manage  things  so  as  to  have  some  of  them  sworn 
in  as  deputies,  and  grab  any  one  of  them  that 
brings  in  a  prisoner,  and  lock  him  up,  too?  Eh?" 
And  later,  when  Teague  reported  not  only  that  the 
Rubes  were  being  gathered  in,  but  that  two  des- 
peradoes of  the  river-front  gang  had  been  held, 
on  John  Doe  warrants,  with  their  prisoners,  War- 
ren chuckled:  "Good  work,  Teague.  Look  out, 
now.  Be  careful  or  you'll  have  both  parties 
storming  your  jail." 

He  telephoned  to  his  daughter  to  say  that  he 
would  not  be  home  to  dinner,  and  the  cheerfulness 
of  her  disappointment  seemed  to  betray  that  she 
was  counting  on  his  absence  for  an  opportunity 
to  see  Pritchard.  He  telephoned  again  some  hours 
later,  when  he  hoped  that  Pritchard  would  be  with 
her,  and  her  voice  was  shaken  with  an  agitation 
that  he  understood.  By  this  tune  he  had  finished 
his  work  on  his  direct  primary  bills  and  he  locked 
them  away  in  a  private  drawer.  He  even  allowed 
himself  a  cigar,  and  sat  back  smoking  it  with  a 
misered  satisfaction,  his  eyes  on  the  shining  metal 
of  his  telephone,  waiting. 

When  Teague  reported  that  the  lynching  had 
been  averted — that  thirty-odd  of  the  would-be 

[118] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

lynchers  were  in  jail,  with  five  members  of  the  river- 
front gang — and  that  the  negroes  and  these  five 
criminals  were  being  taken  out  of  the  county  for 
safe-keeping — Warren  said,  heartily:  "Teague, 
you've  done  a  good  day's  work.  Have  Judge 
Keiser  hear  those  cases  in  the  morning,  and  have 
him  fine  them  for  carrying  weapons.  Nothing 
must  be  said  about  the  attempted  lynching  or 
about  your  part  in  preventing  it.  You  understand 
me?  The  situation  is  too  delicate  for  publicity. 
Good  night." 

He  called  up  his  daughter  immediately  and  asked 
her  to  have  a  late  supper  prepared  for  him,  and 
invited  her  to  come  for  him  with  the  car.  Her 
voice  was  toneless  and  dejected.  He  went  back 
to  his  cigar  and  his  waiting. 

11 

When  he  heard  her  knock  he  threw  away  the 
cigar,  passed  his  handkerchief  across  his  lips,  and 
opened  the  door  in  an  absent-minded  manner, 
looking  back  at  his  desk. 

She  came  in  with  a  black  lace  scarf  on  her  head, 
holding  herself  stiffly  erect. 

He  began  to  gather  up  his  papers.  "Sit  down 
a  minute,  my  dear,"  he  said,  abstractedly. 

She  sat  down  on  the  edge  of  a  chair.  She  did 
not  look  at  him. 

"Pritchard  is  leaving  me  now,"  he  announced. 
"H'e's  going  to  Miller,  too."  She  did  not  speak. 
9  1119] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  glanced  at  her  quickly  and  appraised  her  set 
expression  as  a  girlish  look  of  high  tragedy.  He 
said,  with  cheerf ulness :  "I  suppose  he  thinks  the 
old  ship  is  sinking.  I  imagine  we'll  disappoint  him 
there.  I'm  not  done  yet." 

"Father,"  she  said,  in  an  unexpected  voice,  "I 
want  to  go  away." 

He  sat  down.    He  asked,  "What  has  happened?" 

She  replied,  simply:  "I'm  not  happy  here.  I 
want  to  go  away." 

"Well,  my  dear,"  he  temporized,  with  a  patron- 
izing suavity,  "you're  to  do  whatever  you  wish. 
We're  going  to  see  that  you  are  happy.  What's 
the  trouble?" 

But  suavity  did  not  succeed.  She  shook  her  head, 
looking  away  from  him  as  if  to  evade  his  insincerity. 
"I  can't  talk  of  it.  I  want  to  go  away." 

He  tried  another  trick.  He  asked,  "Are  you 
deserting  me,  too?" 

She  kept  her  eyes  averted. 

"You're  all  I  have,"  he  said. 

She  did  not  reply.  He  got  up  from  his  desk, 
crossed  the  room  to  her,  and  took  her  hand  pater- 
nally. His  face  did  not  betray  his  gratification 
in  feeling  her  missing  ring  on  her  finger.  He  said: 
"I  don't  want  to  ask  you  anything  that  you  don't 
want  me  to  know.  But — perhaps  I  could  help." 

She  turned  away  from  him  to  hide  her  tears. 
"No,"  she  said,  choked.  "No.  It  doesn't  matter." 

"You've  been  disappointed  in  some  one?" 

[120] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

"Ye-e-es." 

"Some  one  you  were  fond  of?" 

She  nodded  her  head,  unable  to  speak. 

"One  of  your  girl  friends?" 

"No.  No.  I  don't  want  to  talk  about  it." 
She  wiped  her  eyes  hastily.  "I  should  have  told 
youilong  ago.  I  couldn't.  He  knew  you  wouldn't 
— approve." 

"And  you?    You  knew  it?" 

She  said,  "I  didn't  understand." 

"Is  that  all?"  he  asked.  "Are  you  concealing 
nothing  else?" 

"Yes,"  she  said,  "I  am.  We  quarreled  because 
he  said  you  weren't — honest — in  politics." 

"Ah!"   He  dropped  her  hand.    "That's  it." 

She  waited,  without  speaking,  watching  him. 

He  began  to  walk  about  very  slowly.  Then  he 
sat  again  at  his  desk  and  gazed  at  her  thoughtfully. 

"Tell  me  first,"  he  asked,  "do  you  want  him 
back?" 

She  answered  at  last:  "No.  .  .  .  He's  not  what  I 
thought  he  was." 

"If  he  had  been,"  he  said,  "he  wouldn't  have 
been  afraid  to  tell  me  of  your  engagement." 

"Yes." 

"You  don't  like  cowards?" 

"No,"  she  said,  deeply.    "No." 

"You're  not  a  coward  yourself." 

"I  have  been." 

"And  you  want  to  go  away  because  you  can't 

[1211 


be  happy  here  if  what  he  says  of  me  is  true.  Is 
that  it?" 

She  caught  her  breath.    "Yes,"  she  said. 

"You're  afraid  it  is  true." 

She  stared  at  him,  her  lips  trembling,  white. 
"No." 

"Don't  be  a  coward,"  he  said,  rising  to  con- 
front her. 

She  tried  to  swallow  the  catch  in  her  throat 
and  her  eyes  were  full  of  pain. 

"He  told  you  the  truth,"  he  said,  harshly.  He 
took  his  papers  from  his  pocket  and  tossed  them 
on  the  desk.  "Now  we  can  go  away  together." 

"Father!" 

He  turned  on  her.  "My  life  here  has  been  what 
the  necessities  of  my  position  have  made  it.  It 
hasn't  been  honest  in  the  sense  that  you  mean. 
And  it  can't  be  if  I  continue  here.  Very  well. 
Let's  be  done  with  it,  then.  Let  some  one  else 
struggle  and  scheme  and  be  the  scapegoat.  I've 
sacrificed — a  great  deal.  I'm  not  going  to  sacrifice 
my  daughter's  confidence." 

She  had  stumbled  across  the  room  to  him,  weep- 
ing, with  her  hands  out  to  him.  He  took  her  in 
his  arms. 

"My  dear,"  he  said,  patting  her  on  the  shoulder, 
"give  me  a  week  to  wind  up  my  office  here — to 
get  the  Governor  to  accept  my  resignation — to  make 
my  plans  to  go  East.  He's  been  wanting  me  to 
take  charge  of  his  campaign  for  the  Presidential 

[122] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

nomination.  I'll  do  it.  Politics  in  this  state  are 
small  and  corrupt.  We'll  escape  from  them  into 
the  national  field  and  the  larger  issues.  You'll 
come  with  me  to  Washington,  and  if  you  never 
reign  like  another  Dolly  Madison  in  the  White 
House,  at  least  you'll  be  the  friend  of  the  Dolly 
Madison  who  does.  And  you'll  never  be  ashamed 
of  your  old  dad." 

"I'm  not  ashamed  of  him,"  she  sobbed. 

"No,"  he  said,  "but  you  might  have  been  if 
I'd  stayed  here.  Come  along  now.  I'm  as  hungry 
as  if  I'd  been  to  a  funeral." 

12 

And  that  was  why  Warren  resigned  from  the 
control  of  his  native  state  /and  went  to  his  career 
in  Washington.  Moreover,  it  is  why  his  career  in 
Washington  followed  the  lines  that  it  did.  Warren 
never  philosophized;  he  handled  facts  as  an  arti- 
san handles  his  tools;  but  if  he  had  philosophized, 
his  theory  of  life  would  probably  have  been  some- 
thing like  this:  "There  is  no  justice,  there  is  no 
morality,  in  nature  or  in  natural  laws;  justice  and 
morality  are  laws  only  of  human  society.  But 
society,  national  life,  and  all  civilization  are  sub- 
ject in  their  larger  aspects  to  natural  laws — which 
contradict  morality  and  outrage  justice — and  the 
statesman  has  to  move  with  those  laws  and  direct 
his  people  in  accordance  with  them,  despite  the 
lesser  by-laws  of  morality  and  justice." 

[128] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


His  daughter  abided  by  the  by-laws.  He  had  to 
conceal  from  her  that  he  did  not  abide  by  them. 
He  had  to  conceal  it  from  the  public.  "The  Amer- 
ican people/*  he  once  said  in  confidence,  "still 
believe  in  Santa  Glaus.  They  believe  that  if  they're 
good,  and  wash  their  faces  every  morning,  and  do 
as  teacher  tells  them,  prosperity  and  well-being 
will  come  down  the  chimney  to  them.  They  don't 
realize  that  some  one  has  to  pay  for  the  full  stock- 
ing, and  that  they're  that  some  one" 

Consequently,  in  his  first  participation  in  na- 
tional affairs,  he  kept  behind  the  scenes.  He  was 
the  stage  director  of  the  convention  that  nominated 
his  Governor  for  the  Presidency,  but  Warren's 
name  was  not  even  on  the  program.  After  he  had 
accepted  his  place  as  Attorney-General  in  Wash- 
ington he  remained  unknown,  except  to  the  inner 
higher  circle  of  politics.  It  was  not  until  he  became 
Secretary  of  State — in  the  third  year  of  his  Presi- 
dent's administration — that  he  grew  conspicuous. 
Then  his  daughter  married  the  son  of  a  man  who 
was  certainly  able  to  protect  her  from  the  dangers 
of  a  competitive  social  system  (the  real  danger  was 
that  the  social  system  would  not  be  able  to  protect 
itself  from  him)  and  Warren  was  at  once  violently 
criticized  and  viciously  lampooned.  It  was  for  his 
daughter's  sake  that  he  ascended  from  this  perse- 
cution into  the  perpetual  felicity  and  peace  of  the 
Supreme  Court.  Since  that  translation — concern- 
ing Thomas  Wales  Warren — "nothing  but  good." 

[124] 


THOMAS    WALES    WARREN 

There  he  sits,  listening  benignly  to  an  eternity  of 
argument,  with  his  jaw  peacefully  relaxed  and  with 
a  curious  protrusion  of  the  lips  occasionally  when 
his  mind  wanders  and — under  cover  of  his  judicial 
robe — he  fingers  blissfully  a  loose  button  on  his 
coat. 


FROM   THE   LIFE 

Benjamin  McNeil  Murdock 


BENJAMIN  McNEIL  MURDOCK 


MURDOCK  is  not  yet  in  Who's  Who,  though  he 
ought  to  be.  He  has  produced  a  potato  as 
big  as  a  turnip,  the  "Murdock  Manitoba,"  and  a 
huge  peach  with  a  stone  no  larger  than  a  cherry- 
pit,  the  "Cantaloup  Alberta."  These  alone  might 
not  entitle  him  to  anything  more  than  honorable 
mention  in  a  seed-catalogue,  but  the  experiments 
by  which  he  achieved  his  potato  and  his  peach 
have  had  another  issue — they  threaten  to  modify 
the  Darwinian  theory  of  the  origin  of  species. 

This  is  a  serious  matter — more  serious  than  has 
been  apprehended  by  the  newspaper  men  who 
have  been  head-lining  Murdock  as  the  "Burbank 
of  New  Jersey."  He  has  obtained  his  new  species 
not  merely  by  cross-fertilization  and  encouraging 
"sports,"  but  by  opposing  his  plants  with  adver- 
sities which  they  have  had  to  overcome  in  order  to 
survive.  He  got  the  idea,  I  understand,  by  observ- 
ing how  flowers  will  grow  a  long  stalk  in  order  to 
reach  sunlight;  but  from  that  beginning  he  has 
worked  to  the  point  of  proving  an  adaptiveness  in 
plants  that  amounts  almost  to  unconscious  intelli- 
gence. Consequently  he  appears  to  find  the  cause 

[129] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


of  variation — and  hence  the  origin  of  species — less 
in  the  outer  pressure  of  the  plant's  environment 
than  in  the  inner  effort  of  the  organism  to  adapt 
itself  to  changing  conditions. 

That,  as  I  say,  is  a  serious  matter.  It  casts  a 
doubt  on  the  whole  mechanistic  theory  of  evolution. 
It  brings  back  into  the  non-sentient  world  a  long- 
banished  creative  intelligence.  It  permits  a  pan- 
psychic  view  of  the  universe  that  is  mystical.  Unless 
I  am  much  mistaken,  the  name  of  Benjamin  Mc- 
Neil Murdock  is  likely  to  be  one  of  the  conspicuous 
names  of  the  century,  and  his  little  farm  in  the 
Washington  Valley  may  even  become  the  storm- 
center  of  a  controversy  as  world-shaking  as  the 
one  that  thundered  over  Darwin's  pigeon-houses 
fifty  years  ago.  You  may  care  nothing  whatever 
about  the  mechanistic  theory,  the  origin  of  species, 
or  the  cause  of  evolution,  but  before  long  you  will 
probably  be  as  curious  about  Murdock  as  your 
father  was  about  Darwin — as  curious  as  I  have 
become  about  Murdock  since  I  found  out  what  he 
was  at. 

2 

For  two  years,  from  my  summer  windows  on 
the  southern  slope  of  Wauchock  Hill,  I  had  looked 
down  on  the  Murdock  Farm  below  us  and  seen  him 
pottering  around,  with  his  "Dago"  assistants, 
among  his  hothouses  and  his  cold-frames.  I  had 
watched  him  with  an  intent  but  idle  observation. 

1130] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

You  know,  from  your  school-days,  that  when  you 
are  trying  to  write,  on  a  blond  June  morning,  at  a 
task  that  drags  and  dawdles  in  a  springing  world, 
there  is  nothing  too  insignificant  to  take  your  eye 
and  captivate  your  interest.  I  had  watched  Mur- 
dock  as  absorbedly  as  if  he  were  a  red  spider  mak- 
ing a  web  on  my  window-screen.  Yet  I  never 
intelligently  saw  what  he  was  doing. 

I  saw  merely  a  lank,  commonplace,  and  simple- 
looking  farmer,  going  about  his  chores  in  faded  blue 
overalls,  a  seersucker  shirt,  and  a  straw  hat  of  the 
kind  that  is  called  a  "cow's  breakfast."  I  was  aware 
that  his  neighbors  thought  him  crazy.  I  had  heard 
it  said  that  he  talked  to  his  vegetables  in  order  to 
make  them  grow  in  the  way  he  wished.  I  knew  that 
he  could  not  talk  to  his  vegetables  less  than  he 
talked  to  his  neighbors;  that  if  it  were  not  for  his 
wife,  he  would  be  as  much  cut  off  from  human 
intercourse  and  understanding  as  one  of  his  own 
prodigious  potatoes.  Everything  about  him — ex- 
cept her — seemed  entirely  ordinary  and  bucolic. 
We  had  only  one  question  to  puzzle  ourselves  with, 
"How  did  he  ever  come  to  marry  her — or  she  him?" 

Then  I  learned,  from  a  chance  reference  in  a 
technical  review,  that  Murdock's  experiments  were 
professionally  considered  as  important  as  those  of 
Hugo  de  Vries;  that  Professor  Jeddes  accepted 
him  as  a  successful  exemplar  of  "a  needed  renewal 
of  the  rustic  point  of  view,"  or,  more  fully,  as  "a 
naturalist  who  grasps  not  only  the  mechanical  and 

[131] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


urban  viewpoint,  but  the  rustic  and  physiological 
one,  theorizing  neither  in  terms  of  the  mere  mech- 
ano-morphism  of  the  physicists  and  the  chemists 
nor  of  the  puzzled  mysticism  of  the  vitalist  philoso- 
phers as  yet  befogged  by  their  urban  environment 
or  bewildered  by  reaction  from  it" — whatever  that 
may  mean. 

It  meant  to  Jeddes,  and  to  the  reviewer,  that 
"Pasteur  was  not  the  last  thinking  peasant."  And 
the  name  of  Pasteur  put  me  to  the  blush.  Had  we 
been  looking  down,  hi  ignorant  superiority  from 
Wauchock  Hill,  upon  the  profound  experiments  of 
a  new  Pasteur?  Apparently  we  had. 


I  carried  the  review  to  Mrs.  Murdock.  She  had 
already  seen  it.  She  was  her  husband's  amanu- 
ensis, and  kept  the  daily  record  of  his  experiments, 
and  wrote  whatever  was  procured  from  him  for 
publication.  She  acted  as  his  interpreter,  at  our 
meeting,  very  gracefully;  and  what  she  interpreted 
was  chiefly  his  silence.  In  a  Mayflower  arm-chair 
beside  the  open  door,  with  his  garden  behind  him, 
he  sat  smiling  amiably  at  us,  unembarrassed,  but 
as  quiet  as  a  sea-captain,  his  feet  planted  firmly  on 
the  floor  in  leather  slippers,  his  hands  resting  on 
the  chair-arms,  his  trowel  in  one  hand  and  his  hay- 
cock hat  in  the  other,  his  bony  head  and  shoulders 
as  gravely  immovable  as  a  mountain,  with  an  air 
about  him  of  something  elemental,  sun-browned, 

[132] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

weather-beaten,  and  placidly  but  incommunicably 
wise. 

She  had  been  trying  to  write  for  him,  and  she 
was  worried  by  a  sense  of  her  shortcomings.  She 
appealed  to  me  for  advice  with  that  respect  which 
you  feel  for  a  writer  whose  works  you  have  never 
read.  He  listened  to  us  as  indulgently  as  Emerson 
contemplating  a  dancing-lesson,  and  I  was  relieved 
when  he  rose  quietly  and  stole  out. 

It  appeared  that  she  was  a  college  graduate, 
educated  in  modern  languages,  a  studious  reader, 
fond  of  serious  fiction  and  able  to  pass  judgment  on 
it  with  cheerful  common  sense.  She  seemed  to 
have  an  idea  that  there  must  be  in  writing,  as  there 
is  in  golf,  a  proper  stance,  a  correct  stroke,  a 
championship  method.  She  had  evidently  been 
an  athletic  young  girl.  She  was  now  perhaps 
thirty,  neither  handsome  nor  graceful,  but  interest- 
ing and  individual.  I  had  seen  her  walking  with 
a  long-armed  stride,  in  low  heels,  with  the  powerful 
shoulder  slouch  of  a  tennis-player;  now  she  sat 
listening  intently,  leaning  forward,  with  her  arms 
folded  on  her  knees,  smiling  apologetically  at  the 
eagerness  and  the  ignorance  of  her  own  questions. 
Her  eyes  were  spirited.  Her  face  was  not.  It  did 
not  express  her.  She  looked  out  from  behind  its 
too  large  and  immobile  features  as  if  knowing  that 
they  came  between  her  and  your  sympathy,  and  as 
if  straining  to  hold  you  to  her  eyes,  which  I  found 
frankly  magnetic. 

[133] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


There  was  something  aristocratic  about  her  easy 
simplicity,  yet  she  seemed  not  out  of  place  in  the 
homely  room  of  that  low-ceilinged  farm-house.  I 
guessed  that  she  was  responsible  for  its  furnishings 
and  decoration,  because  it  was  done  in  the  flat 
tints  and  simple  fittings  of  a  sophisticated  taste. 
I  left  with  the  conviction  that  she  and  her  husband 
were  a  remarkable  couple. 

4 

It  was  a  conviction  that  did  not  endure.  There 
was  nothing  in  their  past  to  support  it.  Imagine: 
he  had  been  born  on  that  farm  some  thirty-five 
years  before;  he  had  had  no  schooling  until  he  was 
nine;  then,  a  hulking,  slow-minded  boy,  he  had 
joined  the  infants'  class  at  the  Wauchock  village 
school,  down  the  valley,  and,  in  the  ordinary  course 
of  education,  he  had  progressed  to  the  public  school 
at  Centerbrook.  When  he  left  school  he  went  to 
work  in  a  grocery  at  Centerbrook,  and  he  moved 
from  there  to  New  York  City,  where  he  became 
bookkeeper  for  the  Perry-Felton  Company  on  Will- 
iam Street.  During  the  years  that  he  lived  in 
New  York  he  returned  to  his  home  only  once — 
when  he  came  to  the  funeral  of  his  parents  and  the 
trial  of  the  hired  man  who  was  found  guilty  of 
having  murdered  them. 

At  the  conclusion  of  that  trial  he  sold  all  the 
farm  stock  and  implements  at  auction,  locked  up 
the  house,  and  returned  to  New  York.  Several 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

years  later  he  reappeared,  evidently  with  money, 
modernized  the  old  place,  and  settled  down  to  an 
absurd  sort  of  gardening,  raising  weeds  in  hot- 
houses, and  generally  behaving  like  a  silent  and 
unapproachable  eccentric.  Within  a  month  of  his 
return  he  married  Ruth  Young,  a  moneyed  girl  of 
Centerbrook  whom  nobody  in  the  Washington 
Valley  knew  he  had  been  courting. 

And  there  was  nothing  remarkable  about  her 
past,  either.  She  was  the  daughter  of  a  Charles 
Washington  Young  who  had  owned  the  stone-quarry 
near  Wauchock  in  Murdock's  boyhood  days.  Young 
and  his  family  had  moved  to  Centerbrook  while 
Murdock  was  still  at  the  village  school,  and  Ruth 
and  he  had  been  at  the  public  school  together,  but 
it  was  not  known  that  there  had  been  anything 
between  them.  Her  father  had  made  a  great  deal 
of  money,  first  out  of  ballast  stone,  then  as  a  rail- 
road contractor,  and  finally  as  a  banker  and  first 
citizen  of  the  county-seat.  He  had  sent  his  daugh- 
ter to  Wellesley.  His  death  brought  her  home  to 
the  pretentious  Colonial  country  house  which  he 
had  built — after  the  model  of  Mount  Vernon — 
on  the  top  of  the  mountain  between  Centerbrook 
and  the  Washington  Valley.  From  there  she  mar- 
ried, .against  her  mother's  wishes.  None  of  her 
relatives  came  to  see  her  as  Mrs.  Murdock.  Her 
husband,  it  seemed,  was  not  "accepted"  in  Center- 
brook,  New  Jersey. 

Now  I  ask  you,  could  anything  seem  more  ordi- 

10  [135] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


nary  than  such  a  history?  Could  you  believe  that, 
beneath  the  superficies  of  these  incidents,  there  was 
hidden  one  of  those  romances  that  life  delights  to 
invent,  perversely,  in  order  to  confound  the  reali- 
ties of  fiction?  No.  No  more  could  I.  Murdock 
might  be  a  great  naturalist,  a  peasant  genius,  an- 
other Pasteur,  but  there  was  obviously  nothing  in 
him  to  repay  prospecting  by  a  short-story  writer. 
I  gave  him  up.  And  then,  unexpectedly,  in  gossip 
about  the  details  of  that  murder  trial,  I  came  on 
traces  of  fiction's  precious  metal,  followed  it,  placer- 
mining,  up  the  course  of  his  history,  and  located 
an  incredibly  rich  mother-lode. 


Take,  first,  the  story  of  the  murder  as  I  dug  it 
out — and  found  it  pay  dirt. 

In  the  fall  of  1910,  during  the  hunting  season, 
two  shots  were  heard  from  the  Murdock  farm  about 
midday.  The  neighbors  thought  nothing  of  it,  or 
supposed  that  old  Murdock  was  killing  rabbits. 
In  the  middle  of  the  afternoon  the  next-door  neigh- 
bor, Mrs.  Heins — a  woman  who  was  always  "run- 
ning the  road,"  as  they  say  in  the  valley — came  to 
the  Murdock  kitchen  door  to  borrow  some  mustard, 
as  an  emetic  for  her  son,  who  had  been  eating 
"musharoons"  that  were  behaving  as  if  they  were 
toadstools.  She  got  no  answer  to  her  knock.  In 
her  anxiety  about  her  son  she  opened  the  door  to 
call  through  the  house,  and  she  saw  old  Murdock 

[136] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

collapsed  in  his  seat  at  the  table  "in  a  mucks  of 
blood,"  and  Mrs.  Murdock  lying  across  an  inner 
threshold  of  the  room  "all  of  a  heap  an'  bleedin' 
like  a  pig-killin'."  She  ran  screaming  back  to  her 
son.  He  hurried  to  the  Murdock  farm,  and  she 
went  spreading  the  alarm  down  the  valley. 

"By  gosh!"  he  said,  afterward,  "it  cured  me,  it 
did.  I  never  knowed  I  was  sick  till  it  was  all  over 
— an'  then  I  wasn't" 

Murdock's  hired  man  was  missing.  He  was  at 
once  suspected.  And  naturally  so.  Murdock's 
hired  men  were  notorious.  He  had  been  in  the 
habit  of  engaging  any  tramp  who  came  to  his 
kitchen  door,  and,  almost  invariably,  after  working 
a  few  weeks,  the  man  disappeared  with  anything 
that  happened  to  be  unprotected  in  the  valley  on 
the  day  of  his  departure.  The  news  "  Ol'  Murdock's 
man's  moved  on"  became  the  signal  for  a  general 
stock-taking  in  the  vicinity. 

The  last  man  had  been  caught  with  a  stolen  shot- 
gun under  his  mattress  before  he  had  time  to  flee, 
and  he  was  sent  to  jail  as  a  vengeance  on  all  those 
others  who  had  escaped.  His  successor  was  a  half- 
witted wanderer  who  said  he  was  on  his  way  to 
visit  "Roseyvelt."  Old  Murdock  told  him  that 
Roosevelt  was  dead,  and  the  man — with  his  main- 
spring broken — seemed  unable  to  go  any  farther. 
Murdock  hired  him  for  his  board  and  a  package  of 
fine-cut  a  week.  Now  he  had  "moved." 

Hunting  parties  with  shot-guns  started  out  in 

[187] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


all  directions  to  seek  his  trail.  He  was  found  in  the 
Murdock  wood-lot,  innocently  cutting  cedar-trees 
for  fence-posts.  He  had  been  there  since  early 
morning;  the  shells  of  four  hard-boiled  eggs  showed 
where  he  had  eaten  his  luncheon,  and  the  trees  that 
he  had  cut  and  stripped  were  numerous  enough  to 
occupy  a  day's  industry. 

Herns  said,  suspiciously,  "That's  more  wood  'n 
I  ever  seen  a  hired  man  cut  in  one  day." 

The  man  replied:  "I  dunno.  Some  of  'em, 
mebbe,  was  yeste'day's  cuttin'." 

Heins  grumbled,  "I  thought  so."  And  that  con- 
versation, related  again  and  again,  was  Heins's 
contribution  to  the  solution  of  the  murder  mystery. 

At  first  they  did  not  tell  the  hired  man  why  they 
were  looking  for  him,  and  he  resented  their  ques- 
tions, sulkily  continuing  his  work.  But  as  soon  as 
he  heard  of  the  murder  he  dropped  his  ax  and  ran 
through  the  woods  to  the  house,  and,  coming  sud- 
denly on  the  scene  in  the  kitchen,  he  fell  back  down 
the  kitchen  steps  in  a  sort  of  fit.  When  he  had  been 
revived  with  a  drink  from  a  hunter's  pocket  flask 
his  innocence  was  conceded. 

He  could  not  be  persuaded  to  enter  the  house. 
He  retreated  to  the  barn,  sat  down  on  the  wheel 
of  a  mowing-machine,  and  told  and  retold  his  story, 
over  and  over,  to  a  constantly  changing  group  of 
men,  women,  and  children.  By  sundown  the  whole 
valley  was  there,  and  all  the  villagers  from  Wau- 
chock.  They  wandered  around  the  house,  the  barn, 

[138] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

the  front  yard,  the  side  garden,  the  woodpile,  and 
the  outhouses  like  a  colony  of  disturbed  ants, 
gathering  in  two  large  clusters  around  the  kitchen 
and  the  barn,  nodding,  shaking  hands,  conversing 
in  low  tones  together,  exchanging  opinions  and  pass- 
ing on  gossip.  By  the  time  the  sheriff  of  the  county 
arrived  a  complete  theory  of  the  crime  had  been 
gathered  for  him.  It  was  this: 

Murdock's  old  hound  had  died  two  days  before. 
Poisoned,  no  doubt.  By  whom?  By  the  murderer. 
Who  was  he?  Well,  Murdock  had  heard,  in  Center- 
brook,  that  the  hired  man  who  had  stolen  the  shot- 
gun was  out  of  jail  and  threatening  him.  Why? 
Because,  according  to  the  man's  story,  he  had  not 
stolen  the  gun;  Murdock  had  stolen  it  and  "  planted  " 
it  on  him. 

"He's  been  drunk  down  there,"  Murdock  told 
his  neighbor,  Heins.  "If  he  comes  bleatin'  around 
here  I'll  blow  him  full  o'  buckshot." 

But  the  man's  threats  and  the  death  of  the  watch- 
dog alarmed  the  household.  Murdock  bolted  his 
doors  and  windows  at  night  and  slept  up-stairs  on 
the  floor  of  an  unfinished  room  of  the  attic,  with 
his  gun  beside  him.  And  he  carried  the  gun  with 
him  when  he  went  to  work  in  the  fields. 

That  gun — a  double-barreled  shot-gun — was  no- 
where to  be  found.  He  had  evidently  stood  it 
beside  the  kitchen  door  when  he  sat  down  to  dinner. 
And  the  murderer  had  crept  up,  under  cover  of  the 
kitchen  weeds,  reached  the  gun  unseen,  shot  Mur- 

[139] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


dock  in  the  back  as  he  sat  at  the  table,  and  shot 
Mrs.  Murdock  point-blank  as  she  ran  in  from  the 
other  room  to  see  what  had  happened.  They  had 
both  been  dead  for  hours  when  Mrs.  Hems  came 
on  them. 

The  sheriff  drove  off  at  once  to  send  out  an  alarm 
for  the  jailbird.  A  deputy  took  charge  of  the  prep- 
arations for  the  inquest  and  cleared  the  house  of 
sight-seers.  They  moved  on  to  the  Heinses',  and 
the  hired  man  went  with  them. 

6 

In  all  this  there  was  no  thought  of  Murdock's 
son,  Ben.  Or  if  any  one  thought  of  him  it  was  only 
to  wonder  where  he  was  and  who  would  notify  him. 
The  whole  valley  knew  that  he  had  quarreled  with 
his  father,  that  he  had  not  been  home  for  years, 
that  if  his  mother  heard  from  him  she  did  not  men- 
tion it.  And  no  one  recognized  him  when,  toward 
midnight,  a  tall  stranger  came  to  the  Heinses' 
kitchen  door  with  a  suit-case  in  his  hand.  He  stood 
scrutinizing  the  group  of  late-stayers  in  the  lamp- 
light around  the  kitchen  table,  looked  from  them 
to  the  hired  man  who  sat  alone  smoking  beside  the 
range,  and  asked,  abruptly,  "Are  you  Murdock's 
man?" 

They  supposed  he  was  a  detective.  He  wore  city 
blacks  and  a  black  felt  hat  and  a  starched  collar. 
The  hired  man  slowly  turned  his  head — a  classical 
head,  the  head  and  bronzed  profile  of  a  Caesar  on  a 

[140] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

Roman  coin.  And  the  stranger  said  to  him,  "I'm 
Ben  Murdock." 

That  was  all  Murdock  did  say.  For  the  rest  of 
the  evening  he  listened.  And  he  listened  in  a 
peculiar  way.  After  the  first  quick  glance  at  this 
one  or  that  one  with  whom  he  shook  hands  he  looked 
past  them,  with  a  troubled  frown,  as  if  dissatisfied, 
and  thereafter  he  avoided  meeting  their  eyes  in  a 
direct  gaze. 

It  turned  out  to  be  a  habit  of  manner.  He  had 
a  trick  of  looking  at  the  chest  of  the  person  that 
stood  talking  to  him;  and  when  they  were  all 
sitting  again  he  looked  at  their  knees  or  at  their 
feet,  with  no  expression  of  shyness  or  self -conscious- 
ness. Only  the  hired  man's  face  he  studied  thought- 
fully, in  an  absent-minded  muse.  And  the  hired 
man,  smoking  apart,  with  his  air  of  distinguished 
vacancy,  remained  beside  the  greasy  stove  in 
silence,  refusing  to  answer  even  when  they  spoke 
to  him. 

"He's  sort  o'  dumb,"  they  explained,  in  the  idiom 
of  the  valley,  meaning  by  "dumb"  half-witted. 

Ben  Murdock  showed  little  emotion  over  the 
story  of  the  murder.  Once,  when  they  were  telling 
about  the  man  who  had  been  sent  to  jail  for  steal- 
ing the  shot-gun,  he  took  out  his  handkerchief  and 
wiped  his  forehead  as  if  it  were  wet  with  perspira- 
tion. And  a  moment  later,  when  they  were  telling 
how  the  other  hired  men  had  invariably  turned 
out  to  be  thieves,  he  suddenly  raised  to  them  a 

[141] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


bewildered  face  of  suffering.  It  moved  Mrs.  Heins 
to  take  him  away  from  the  visitors  by  offering  to 
make  up  a  bed  for  him  on  the  parlor  sofa.  He 
accepted  the  bed  without  thanks  and  left  the 
kitchen  without  saying  good  night. 

No  one  was  offended.  They  took  it  as  proof  that 
he  was  still  one  of  them;  that,  although  he  had 
acquired  city  clothes  and  a  city  pallor,  he  had  not 
descended  to  any  city  insincerities  of  formal  polite- 
ness. 

He  was  up  and  out  before  breakfast,  wandering 
alone  around  the  parental  farm.  He  ate  his  break- 
fast silently,  and  no  one  intruded  upon  him  with 
any  social  expression  of  sympathy.  Mrs.  Heins  saw 
that  he  had  food  and  drink;  the  others  talked  around 
him  as  if  he  were  not  there.  They  merely  made  it 
a  point  not  to  speak  of  the  murder.  When  he  had 
finished  he  asked  where  the  nearest  telephone  could 
be  reached,  and  went  out  to  find  it.  As  soon  as  he 
was  gone  the  hired  man  drifted  in  from  nowhere 
for  his  breakfast. 

In  about  an  hour  Murdock  came  back  with  the 
sheriff  and  asked  for  this  hired  man.  He  had 
gravitated  naturally  to  the  barn.  They  went  after 
him.  "Come  along,  Jack,"  the  sheriff  said.  "We 
want  you  to  show  us  where  you  were  workin'  when 
this  happened." 

His  name  was  not  "Jack."  He  was  anonymous. 
But  he  accepted  "Jack,"  as  he  accepted  "Bill" 
or  "Bo."  indifferently. 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

He  struck  out  across  the  fields  to  Murdock's 
wood-lot,  and  they  followed  him.  As  they  went 
Murdock  pointed  out  significantly  to  the  sheriff 
the  fence-line  between  his  father's  farm  and  Heins's; 
it  was  a  thick  hedge  of  small  cedars,  sassafras, 
blackberry  brambles,  and  poison  ivy,  and  it  ran 
from  the  Murdock  garden-patch  to  the  edge  of  the 
woods  toward  which  they  were  walking.  The  sheriff 
looked  at  it  and  nodded. 

They  entered  the  wood-lot  at  a  pole  gate,  came 
to  a  brook  where  cows  were  pasturing  on  a  little 
clearing  of  grass  and  brambles,  crossed  the  stream 
on  stepping-stones,  and  followed  a  cow-path  through 
the  underbrush  into  the  taller  timber. 

The  hired  man  stopped  at  the  first  of  the  cedars 
that  he  had  cut  down.  "Yep,"  the  sheriff  said. 
"Where's  the  rest?" 

The  rest  were  in  a  bend  of  the  stream  at  the  foot 
of  a  raw  bank  of  red  shale  that  confined  the  creek 
at  flood-time.  The  sheriff  looked  them  over. 
"Well?"  he  said,  inquiringly,  to  Murdock. 

Murdock  pointed  to  a  large  flat  stone  at  the  foot 
of  the  bank.  "Tell  him  to  turn  that  over." 

He  spoke  to  the  sheriff,  but  he  was  looking  at 
the  hired  man. 

"What  for?"  the  sheriff  asked. 

"Tell  him  to  do  it." 

The  man  apparently  had  not  heard.  He  was 
standing  aside,  gazing  strangely  at  a  shrub  of  scarlet 
sumac  in  front  of  him. 

[us] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


The  sheriff  ordered:  "Here!  See  that  stone? 
Turn  it  over.'* 

He  got  no  answer. 

"Here,  you!"  he  said.  "Look-a-here!"  and  took 
him  by  the  shoulder. 

He  found  the  man  trembling  hysterically  under 
his  hand,  and  he  cried,  "What!  What  the  hell?" 
looking  at  Murdock. 

Murdock  made  a  vague,  unhappy,  pitiful  gesture, 
turning  away. 

The  sheriff  strode  up  to  the  stone  and  rolled  it 
over.  It  covered  the  mouth  of  a  rabbit-burrow  and 
the  shining  butt-plate  of  a  shot-gun  that  had  been 
forced  into  the  hole.  There  was  a  moment  of 
deadly  silence.  Then  the  maniac,  falling  on  his 
knees  before  the  sumac,  made  the  motions  of  wash- 
ing his  hands  in  the  reddened  foliage.  "Blood!"  he 
said,  hoarsely.  "Blood!  He  killed  Roseyvelt!" 

He  made  no  attempt  to  escape.  He  let  the  sheriff 
take  him  back  to  the  farm-house,  hitch  up  a  team, 
and  drive  him  to  the  county  jail.  To  all  their 
questions  he  only  mumbled,  "He  killed  Roseyvelt!" 

7 

It  came  out  at  his  trial  that  in  the  middle  of  corn- 
husking  he  had  heard  that  Roosevelt  was  alive.  He 
had  wanted  to  leave  at  once  on  his  pilgrimage  to 
Oyster  Bay.  Old  Murdock  had  said:  "  Alive  nuthin'. 
I  killed  him  myself.  His  body's  hid  in  the  attic 
over  your  bedroom."  And,  haunted  insanely  by 

[144] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

that  secret  of  the  attic  overhead,  he  had  killed 
Murdock  out  of  revenge. 

What  did  not  come  out  at  the  trial — though  the 
whole  valley  knew  it — was  this: 

The  deputy  sheriff,  searching  the  hired  man's 
bedroom  after  his  arrest,  climbed  through  the  trap 
in  the  ceiling  of  the  room«aVid  found  in  a  corner  of 
the  loft  a  collection  of  farm  tools,  axes,  dishes, 
crowbars,  pots,  and  household  articles  that  had  been 
hidden  there  under  a  pile  of  old  sacks.  At  first 
he  thought  that  he  had  simply  discovered  evidence 
against  the  man  who  had  stolen  the  gun.  But 
when  the  neighbors  were  called  in  to  claim  their 
property  it  appeared  that  some  of  the  things  had 
been  stolen  years  before.  Murdock's  words,  "The 
body's  hidden  in  the  attic  over  your  bedroom," 
established  Murdock's  guilt.  He  had  been  a  klep- 
tomaniac. He  had  stolen  all  the  things  which  his 
hired  men  had  been  accused  of  stealing.  He  had  been 
doing  it  for  years,  and  no  one  had  suspected  him. 

Except,  possibly,  his  son  Ben.  Old  Heins  re- 
called that  once,  years  before,  when  Ben  was  a 
small  boy,  a  new  sickle  had  disappeared  from  the 
Heins  tool-house.  He  was  looking  for  it  in  his 
fields  when  he  saw  Murdock  and  his  son  over  the 
fence,  and  asked  them  if  they  had  noticed  the  sickle 
lying  about.  Murdock  said,  "No,"  but  young  Ben 
said  nothing.  He,  too,  was  "  kind  o'  dumb  "  in  those 
days.  He  went  back  to  his  father's  barn  and  re- 
appeared with  the  sickle.  His  father  demanded 

[145] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


where  he  had  found  it.  He  said  he  had  found  it 
under  the  corn-stalks  in  the  barn.  How  had  he 
known  it  was  there?  He  said  he  hadn't  known — 
•he  had  "just  guessed."  His  father  cried:  "Guessed! 
Did  you  steal  that  sickle?"  And  in  the  end  he  beat 
the  boy  hi  a  rage,  shouting:  "I'll  teach  you  to 
steal!  I'll  teach  you!" 

Now,  in  the  account  of  the  murder,  there  was 
one  detail  that  had  interested  and  puzzled  me. 
When  the  sheriff  asked  Ben  Murdock  how  he  had 
thought  of  looking  for  the  shot-gun  under  that 
particular  stone  in  the  wood-lot,  Murdock  replied 
that  he  had  "just  guessed"  that  it  was  there.  And 
when  I  heard  old  Heins's  story  of  the  finding  of  the 
sickle  I  was  struck  by  the  coincidence.  I  guessed 
something  myself.  And  I  began  to  verify  it  by 
gathering  together  every  anecdote,  every  reminis- 
cence, every  bit  of  gossip  that  I  could  get  about 
Ben  Murdock  anywhere.  When  I  had  enough  to 
establish  my  theory  of  him  I  broached  it  to  Mlrs. 
Murdock  one  evening,  after  dinner,  and  I  got  it 
confirmed,  first  by  what  she  told  of  him,  then  by 
what  he  admitted — with  an  odd  scientific  detach- 
ment, as  if  he  were  talking  of  some  one  else — and 
at  last  by  what  they  both  related  together  concerning 
the  incredible  incidents  that  led  to  their  marriage. 

8 

As  far  as  I  can  make  out,  the  whole  thing  began 
in  the  autumn  of  1893,  when  Murdock  was  about 

[146] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

nine  years  old.  And  it  began  with  the  visit  of  a 
patent-medicine  vender  who  drove  into  Wauchock 
from  the  direction  of  Pluckamin,  in  a  gipsy  wagon 
with  two  pinto  ponies,  selling  an  "Indian  Herb 
Remedy"  that  was  guaranteed  to  cure  all  known 
diseases,  including  baldness.  He,  in  buckskins, 
and  his  wife,  in  a  Carmen  costume,  gave  a  free  en- 
tertainment of  songs  and  sleight-of-hand,  roping, 
knife-throwing,  and  Spanish  dancing,  at  night,  by 
the  light  of  their  kerosene-torches,  and  in  the  inter- 
vals between  their  acts  they  sold  their  Indian  Herb 
Remedy. 

Young  Ben  Murdock  had  been  sent  to  the  village 
by  his  mother  to  get  a  stone  vinegar-jug  filled 
with  kerosene  for  the  household  lamps.  He  found 
the  yard  in  front  of  the  school-house  flaring  with 
torchlights,  and  over  the  head  of  a  silent  audience 
he  saw  the  long-haired  Westerner,  with  a  braided 
mustache,  ballyhooing  his  medicine.  The  boy  drew 
nearer.  He  ended  by  making  his  way  into  the 
front  row,  against  the  little  platform  on  which 
Carmen  was  finishing  a  bored  fandango  to  the 
castanets,  while  her  husband  praised  his  cure-all. 

Nobody  was  buying.  The  faker,  searching  the 
upturned  faces  for  a  customer,  saw  the  boy.  Ben 
had  been  suffering  all  day  with  toothache;  his  face 
was  swollen,  and  that  may  have  attracted  the  man's 
notice.  Mrs.  Murdock  had  tried  to  ease  her  son's 
pain  with  horse  liniment,  a  few  drops  of  which  she 
had  put  on  the  tooth  itself;  there  had  probably 

[147] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


been  some  narcotic  in  the  dose,  for  Ben  had  been 
feeling  dazed  ever  since,  and  his  dull-eyed,  stupe- 
fied look  may  have  struck  the  faker. 

At  any  rate,  he  came  to  the  edge  of  the  platform 
and  said:  "Well  now,  here's  some  one  needs  this 
great  nosterum.  Eh,  sonny?  Come  up  here."  And 
taking  Ben  under  the  arm,  he  lifted  him  to  the  stage. 

The  crowd  laughed.  Benjamin  McNeil  Murdock 
was  then  an  overgrown  young  dolt,  shock-haired 
and  open-mouthed,  in  a  torn  shirt  and  a  pair  of 
his  father's  patched  overalls,  and  nothing  else. 
He  had  no  hat.  He  was  barefooted.  The  medicine 
man  held  him  by  the  shoulder  and  he  hung  his  head 
sheepishly.  He  was  supposed  to  be  half-witted, 
and  he  looked  it. 

"What's  the  matter,  bub?"  the  man  asked. 
"Sick?" 

Ben  did  not  answer.  The  man  put  a  firm,  cool 
hand  under  his  chin,  tilted  his  head  back,  and 
studied  him. 

"Toothache,  eh?"  he  said.  "Fine!  This  here's 
a  suverin  remedy  for  toothache.  Also  fer  trouble 
with  the  eyes.  This  boy,"  he  told  the  audience, 
"is  near  dead  with  toothache,  an'  it's  afflictin'  his 
eyes." 

Ben  began  to  blink.  He  was  held  facing  a  kero- 
sene-torch that  shone  directly  in  his  eyes. 

"He  can't  look  at  a  light  "Without  feelin*  sleepy. 
He  can't  keep  his  eyes  open.  This  here  pain  has 
worn  him  out.  He's  dog-tired.  His  eyes  is  tired." 

[148] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

Ben's  eyes  had  closed. 

"Bring  me  a  chair  here,  Mirey."  His  wife  brought 
the  chair.  "There!  Sit  down  on  that.  You're 
dog-tired." 

Ben  sank  weakly  into  the  seat. 

"Now,"  he  said,  "first  we'll  cure  them  eyes." 
And,  pretending  to  pour  some  of  his  remedy  into 
the  palm  of  his  hand,  he  began  to  stroke  the  boy 
into  a  mesmeric  sleep.  "This  boy,"  he  kept  saying, 
"is  worn  out  with  pain.  It's  passin'.  It's  passin'. 
Just  like  he  was  fallin'  asleep  an*  fergettin'  it. 
That's  it.  Just  like  you  was  fallin'  asleep,  sonny. 
Fallin'  asleep." 

When  he  saw  from  Ben's  regular  breathing  that 
he  was  unconscious  he  announced,  "We'll  now  cure 
the  toothache."  And  he  proceeded  to  rub  Ben's 
swollen  cheek  very  gently  with  an  application  of 
the  Indian  Herb  Remedy.  "The  results,"  he  said, 
"is  almost  instantous.  The  sufferin'  begins  to  stop. 
Like  you'd  slep'  it  off.  Feelin'  better?" 

He  bent  down.    Ben's  lips  moved  inaudibly. 

"Yes.    He  says  he's  feelin'  better." 

His  wife  was  standing  beside  him,  holding  the 
bottle  of  medicine,  watching  anxiously,  alarmed  be- 
cause the  boy  had  "gone  under"  so  quickly.  She 
poured  out  a  spoonful  of  the  remedy  and  offered 
it  to  her  husband. 

"All  right,  now,"  he  said.  "This  '11  do  the  trick. 
This  '11  fix  it.  Open  yer  mouth." 

Ben  opened  it,  with  his  eyes  shut. 

[149] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


"That's  right.  Open  yer  eyes,  too.  They're 
all  right.  They're  better.  That's  the  way.  Now 
swallow  this  down.  Tastes  good,  eh?" 

Ben  nodded. 

"Good.  Now  you  feel  better.  Don't  you?  Yes? 
Well,  tell  'em  how  you  feel." 

And  Ben  said  in  a  strange,  high  voice,  "I  feel  a 
hull  lot  better." 

"Good.    Toothache  gone,  too?" 

Ben  nodded. 

"Good.  Now,  to  show  you  people  this  's  no 
fake — "  He  took  the  boy's  swollen  cheek  between 
thumb  and  forefinger  and  pinched  it  till  the  spot 
showed  white.  Ben  did  not  flinch.  "Couldn't  'a' 
done  that  five  minutes  ago,  eh?  He'd  'a'  howled. 
That  swellin' — that  '11  go  down  in  about  an  hour 
er  so.  Now."  He  corked  the  bottle.  "You  take 
this,  sonny,  an'  run  home  to  yer  mom,  an'  tell  her 
if  she  ever  has  a  toothache  what  to  do  with  it. 
Go  right  to  sleep  as  soon  's  you  get  home,  an'  you'll 
wake  up  in  the  mornin'  feelin'  like  a  nest  o'  young 
robins,  an*  ready  to  start  right  off  to  school.  Run 
along."  He  was  helping  Ben  from  the  platform. 
"Right  home.  Get  in  out  o'  the  night  air.  I 
don't  want  no  neuraligy  to  strike  into  that  jaw  o' 
yourn.  I  want  you  at  school  as  a  proof  to  the  great 
Indian  Herb  Remedy.  Now,  my  Christian  frien's, 
the  price  o'  this  suverin  cure  fer  sufferin'  is  fifty 
cents,  but  on  this  occasion — " 

He  watched  Ben  making  his  way  through  the 

[150] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

crowd  with  the  bottle  of  medicine  clasped  to  his 
bosom. 

"The  price  o'  this  mirac'lous  med'cine  to-night 
is  a  quarter  of  a  dollar.  Thank  you,  partner.  Here 
we  are.  Who's  next?" 

And  Ben  stumbled  off  down  the  road  toward 
his  home  in  the  dark,  like  a  sleep-walker,  while  all 
Wauchock  behind  him  reached  out  its  hands  for 
that  mirac'lous  Herb  Remedy. 

It  was  a  very  dazed-looking  boy  who  returned 
to  the  Murdock  kitchen,  carrying  a  bottle  of  pat- 
ent medicine  instead  of  a  jug  of  kerosene.  And 
at  his  mother's  cry  of,  "What  you  got  there? 
Where's  the  coal-oil?"  he  put  the  bottle  on  the 
kitchen  table,  sat  down  unsteadily,  and  dropped 
forward,  his  head  on  his  arms,  in  a  sleep  from 
which  she  could  not  wake  him.  She  put  him  to 
bed,  scolding  him  distractedly. 

He  woke  up  in  the  morning  clear-minded,  but 
with  no  recollection  of  what  had  happened  after 
the  man  had  offered  to  cure  his  toothache.  No  one 
suspected  that  he  had  been  hypnotized.  When 
Wauchock  found  that  its  Herb  Remedy  was  no 
cure  for  anything — not  even  for  thirst — they  sup- 
posed that  Ben,  being  a  "plum*  idiot,"  had  allowed 
the  faker  to  persuade  him  that  his  toothache  was 
better  when  it  wasn't.  Moreover,  the  toothache 
returned,  and  his  mother  had  to  take  him  to  the 
dentist  in  Centerbrook  to  have  the  tooth  out. 
His  reputation  as  the  village  idiot  was  entirely 
11  [ 151  ] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


established  by  the  incident.     He  supported  it  in 
confirmatory  silence. 

9 

And  yet  something  had  changed  in  him.  As 
soon  as  he  woke  up  that  morning  he  said  to  his 
mother,  "I  want  to  go  to  school."  She  took  him 
to  the  dentist  instead.  A  few  days  later  he  went 
to  his  father  and  said,  sulkily,  "I  want  to  go  to 
school." 

He  had  never  been  sent  to  school — and  the 
authorities  had  not  insisted  that  he  should  be 
sent — because  it  was  understood  that  he  was  too 
"dumb"  to  learn.  His  father  had  given  him  that 
reputation;  he  wanted  the  boy  at  home  to  watch 
the  cows;  there  were  no  secure  fences  on  the 
Murdock  farm,  and  Ben  spent  his  days  in  the  wood 
and  pasture-lot  as  stupidly  as  a  watch-dog.  The 
father  himself  was  "queer."  He  had  not  been 
quite  right  since  he  had  fallen  from  a  load  of  hay, 
struck  his  head,  and  been  unconscious  for  three 
days  "right  smack  in  the  middle  o'  the  best  hayin* 
weather." 

He  replied,  now:  "School  nuthin*.  Might  9s 
well  send  those  calfs  to  school.  Go  *n*  do  yer 
chores." 

The  boy  went  back  to  his  work,  and  nothing 
more  was  said  about  school.  But  the  incident  of 
Heins  and  the  sickle  followed;  and  that  night, 
milking  in  the  stable,  Ben  took  up  a  pitchfork  and 

[152] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

said,  menacingly,  to  his  father,  "You  lemme  go 
to  school  er  I'll  tell  'at  you're  stealin'  things  an' 
hidin'  'em  in  the  hayloft." 

He  has  explained,  relating  the  incident:  "I 
don't  know  what  had  come  over  me.  I  don't  know 
how  I  knew  what  he'd  been  doing.  I  just  said  it 
— and  then  I  felt  as  if  I'd  known  it  all  along.  I 
remember  he  looked  at  me  as  though  I'd  tried  to 
stab  him  with  the  fork,  and  he  dropped  the  milk- 
pail  and  ran  out  of  the  stable." 

He  was  allowed  to  go  to  school.  And  very 
little  good  it  seemed  to  do  him.  He  was  incurably 
dull  at  his  books,  although  he  was  permitted  to 
labor  over  them  at  home  as  much  as  he  pleased. 
His  father  never  interfered  with  him  in  any  way; 
they  hardly  spoke.  What  his  mother  thought  of  it 
I  do  not  know.  Murdock  has  never  talked  of  her. 
To  the  neighbors  she  seems  to  have  been 
merely  a  lean,  hard-faced,  meager  woman  who 
struggled  through  a  life  of  unceasing  but  inefficient 
drudgery,  handicapped  by  the  stupidity  and  shift- 
lessness  of  her  "men-folk." 

10 

Of  Ben  Murdock  in  the  village  school  I  have 
found  only  one  anecdote,  and  I  got  that  from 
Sheriff  Steiner  in  talking  with  him  about  the  mur- 
der case.  It  appears  that  Steiner  was  rather  a 
bully  in  his  school-days,  and  he  "picked  on  Benny" 
as  a  proper  butt,  _until  one  day  in  the  winter  Ben 

[153] 


FROM    THE   LIFE 


said  to  him,  "You  tit  me  again  an'  I'll  tell  'em 
you're  wearin*  yer  sister's  made-over  underclothes." 

As  the  sheriff  says:  "It  knocked  me  all  of  a  heap. 
I'd  'a'  died  rather  'n  have  any  one  know  it.  You 
know  the  way  a  boy  feels  'bout  things  like  that. 
Well,  I  let  Benny  alone  after  that,  you  bet." 

And  of  this  incident  I  could  get  no  explanation. 
Murdock  did  not  remember  it.  He  did  not  remem- 
ber that  Sterner  had  "picked"  on  him.  He  believed 
that  the  sheriff  was  confusing  him  with  some  other 
boy. 

What  he  did  remember  was  this :  When  he  began 
to  study  arithmetic  he  was  unknowingly  a  "mathe- 
matical prodigy,"  like  the  famous  Gauss  and  the 
more  famous  Ampere.  He  used  to  do  a  problem 
by  first  putting  down  the  answer  and  then  working 
back  to  the  solution.  How  he  knew  the  answers  he 
cannot  now  explain.  "I  lost  the  trick  after  a  while," 
he  says.  "At  first  I  could  do  it  sometimes,  and  then 
sometimes  I  couldn't.  And  then  I  lost  it  altogether. 
I  can  still  add  up  a  column  of  figures  by  running 
my  eye  up  it  and  keeping  my  mind  a  blank.  The 
figures  add  themselves  for  me  if  I  don't  interfere 
with  them.  That's  how  I  came  to  be  a  book- 
keeper." 

He  lost,  for  a  time,  even  that  small  remnant  of 
his  ability  as  a  "calculating  boy"  during  his  years 
at  the  Centerbrook  school.  And  he  lost  it  as  a 
result  of  a  whipping  which  the  teacher  gave  him. 

It  seems  that  the  class  had  been  set  an  unusually 

[154] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

difficult  problem  to  do  at  home,  and  Ben  arrived 
with  the  correct  answer  for  it.  He  was  sent  to  the 
blackboard  to  write  out  his  solution,  and  there  was 
nothing  correct  in  his  demonstration  except  the 
final  line.  The  teacher  accused  him  of  having 
found  the  example  and  its  answer  in  some  book  of 
arithmetic,  and  Ben  in  self-defense  had  to  explain 
that  he  had  "just  guessed'*  it. 

"Well,"  the  teacher  said,  sarcastically,  "let  us 
see  you  guessing.  Turn  your  back  to  the  board. 
Now  tell  me  what  are  the  three  figures  I've  written 
on  it." 

Ben  stood  a  moment,  staring  at  the  grinning  class. 
The  sympathetic  face  of  a  little  girl  in  a  back  row 
caught  his  eye.  And  suddenly  he  gave  the  figures 
correctly. 

"You're  cheating!"  the  teacher  cried.  "You  saw 
them  reflected  somewhere." 

"No,  I  didn't,"  Ben  pleaded.   "I  guessed  them." 

"Very  good,"  the  teacher  said.  "Keep  your  eyes 
on  the  floor  and  guess  these!" 

But  by  this  time  the  boy  was  so  bewildered  and 
the  class  was  in  such  an  uproar  that  he  could  not 
have  guessed  his  own  name.  He  named  three  figures 
at  random.  Not  one  of  them  was  right.  "Hold 
out  your  hand,"  the  teacher  ordered. 

When  school  was  dismissed  and  Ben  started, 
swollen-eyed,  on  his  walk  over  the  mountain  to 
Wauchock,  he  was  waylaid  by  the  little  girl  from 
the  back  row.  "I'm  sorry,"  she  said.  "I  got  scared." 

[155] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


That  did  not  mean  anything  to  him.  He  hurried 
away,  shamefaced,  without  answering  her. 

And  for  the  rest  of  his  career  in  school  he  avoided 
"guessing." 

11 

As  a  career  it  was  neither  long  nor  brilliant. 
At  the  end  of  his  second  term  he  went  to  work  in 
Simpson's  grocery,  because  he  had  no  money  to 
buy  clothes  that  were  fit  to  wear  to  school.  He 
never  got  back  to  a  class-room.  Neither  did  he 
ever  return  to  his  home.  He  was  given  a  bedroom 
over  the  shop,  and  he  ate  with  the  grocer's  family, 
but  he  lived  very  much  to  himself,  taking  long 
walks  in  the  evenings  and  spending  his  Sundays 
alone  on  the  country  roads.  He  was  a  slow,  silent, 
methodical  young  man.  At  first  he  worked  as  a 
delivery-boy  and  general  help.  Then  he  was  taken 
behind  the  counter,  and  there  he  found  himself  a 
"lightning  calculator"  again,  and  he  was  given  the 
accounts  to  keep. 

He  remained  in  that  position  more  than  a  year. 
And  he  does  not  seem  to  have  visited  his  home  at 
all  during  that  time.  I  do  not  know  why.  He  does 
not  speak  of  his  relations  with  his  people.  But  it 
is  apparent  that  he  was  pursued  by  a  guilty  con- 
sciousness of  his  father's  kleptomania,  and  that  the 
thought  of  it  made  him  morbid,  solitary,  and  afraid 
of  impending  disgrace.  I  infer  this  from  the  fact 
that  he  admits  he  left  Centerbrook  because  of  a 

[156] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

dream  in  which  his  father,  having  been  arrested 
for  stealing,  was  tried  in  the  school-house  yard, 
after  dark,  on  a  platform  under  the  flare  of  innumer- 
able grinning  kerosene-torches.  Before  all  the  evi- 
dence was  in  it  was  Ben  himself  who  was  being 
tried,  by  the  mathematical  teacher;  he  was  con- 
demned to  have  his  teeth  pulled  out;  and  he  woke 
in  a  clammy  fright,  haunted  by  the  fear  that  his 
father's  thefts  would  be  discovered  and  he  would 
be  discharged  from  the  grocery. 

He  left  Centerbrook  in  answer  to  a  want  adver- 
tisement for  a  bookkeeper  in  a  New  York  news- 
paper. He  went  to  work  for  the  Perry-Felton  Com- 
pany. And  for  ten  years  nothing  happened  to  him 
more  exciting  than  a  raise  of  salary.  He  made  no 
friends.  He  had  no  companions.  For  a  time  he 
lived  in  a  boarding-house,  and  then,  in  answer  to 
another  advertisement,  he  took  a  room  in  a  flat 
with  a  childless  German  couple  who  spoke  almost 
no  English.  He  remained  with  them  as  long  as 
he  remained  in  New  York.  He  talked  to  no  one. 
He  says  he  had  an  unpleasant  feeling  that  people 
were  never  sincere;  they  said  all  sorts  of  things 
that  they  did  not  really  think;  you  could  see  it 
in  their  eyes.  He  preferred  to  read,  and  he  read 
chiefly  newspapers.  Then  he  developed  a  curious 
hobby  that  led  him  to  read  science. 

One  of  the  clerks  at  Perry-Felton's  brought  a 
popular  "wire  puzzle"  to  the  office,  and  after  every 
one  else  had  failed  to  do  it  Murdock  solved  it 

[157] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


almost  at  a  glance.  The  clerk,  piqued,  brought 
another  next  day.  It  was  more  difficult,  but  Mur- 
dock  unraveled  it  quickly  enough.  All  the  clerks 
joined  in  the  game,  and  Murdock  began  to  buy 
puzzles  in  order  to  study  them  secretly  in  his  rooms 
so  as  to  be  ready  if  the  clerks  produced  them.  It 
developed  into  a  hobby  with  him.  He  became  so 
expert  that  the  whole  staff  gossiped  about  it.  One 
day  the  office  manager,  having  watched  him  do  a 
Chinese  puzzle  that  was  supposed  to  be  practically 
insoluble,  said:  "Well,  I  know  one  puzzle  you'll 
never  find  an  answer  to.  I'll  bring  it  to  you." 
And  next  morning  he  arrived  with  a  book  called 
The  Sphinx's  Riddle  and  laid  it  on  Murdock's 
desk. 

It  was  a  volume  from  a  popular-science  series 
that  stated,  in  a  simple  way,  the  mystery  of  the 
origin  of  life  in  terms  of  evolution.  It  gave  Benja- 
min McNeil  Murdock  his  start.  Scientific  books 
began  to  take  the  place  of  puzzles  on  his  bureau. 
In  a  few  months  he  was  buying  bookcases.  He 
carried  books  to  his  office  and  read  at  his  luncheon. 
He  read  till  all  hours  of  the  night.  Even  on  his 
Sunday  walking-trips  up  the  Hudson  he  carried  a 
volume  in  his  pocket  and  read  under  the  trees. 
And  between  walking  miles  to  his  work  every 
morning  and  miles  back  at  night,  and  reading  in- 
satiably whenever  he  was  not  asleep,  his  time  out 
of  office  hours  was  so  occupied  that  during  all 
those  years  in  New  York  he  never  entered  a  thea- 

[158] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

ter,  or  heard  a  concert,  or  even  dropped  into  a 
moving-picture  show. 

The  funeral  of  his  parents,  and  the  murder  trial 
that  followed,  made  only  a  momentary  interruption 
in  his  routine.  After  it  was  all  over  he  returned 
to  his  office  tragically  depressed,  but  freer  in  his 
mind  because  the  apprehension  of  disgrace  had 
been  removed  by  his  father's  death.  He  had  saved 
twenty-one  hundred  dollars.  He  owned  a  farm. 
He  began  to  figure  on  how  much  it  would  cost  him 
to  live  in  the  country;  what  was  the  best  rate  of 
interest  he  could  get  on  a  safe  investment  if  he 
withdrew  his  money  from  the  savings-bank  and 
bought  bonds;  and  what  were  the  possibilities  of 
scientific  farming  if  he  took  it  up. 

12 

Turning  these  things  over  in  his  mind,  he  was 
walking  back  from  his  office  one  August  evening 
about  half  past  six,  when  he  passed  the  restaurant 
windows  of  a  Fifth  Avenue  hotel  and  saw  a  young 
woman  dining  there  with  an  elderly  man  behind  the 
flowers  of  the  window-sill  boxes.  The  window  was 
open,  and  she  looked  up  as  Murdock  glanced  at 
her.  Their  eyes  met.  His  was  an  absent-minded 
glance,  and  he  had  passed  on  before  it  occurred 
to  him  that  she  had  seemed  to  recognize  him. 
He  decided  that  she  had  been  looking  at  some  one 
else  on  the  street.  Nevertheless,  at  the  corner, 
instead  of  continuing  on  his  way  to  his  room,  he 

[159] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


turned  quite  automatically  down  the  side  street 
and  walked  along  that  front  of  the  hotel  to  the 
side  entrance. 

He  believes,  now,  that  he  had  unconsciously 
recognized  her,  and  that  this  recognition  drew  him 
into  the  hotel.  He  admits  that  nothing  of  the  sort 
was  in  his  conscious  thoughts.  It  was  a  warm 
evening,  and  he  was  tired  walking.  He  had  planned 
to  have  his  dinner  in  the  cheap  restaurant  near  his 
room,  where  he  always  dined;  but  that  restaurant 
was  small  and  smelly,  and  the  hotel  dining-room 
had  looked  invitingly  airy  and  cool.  He  bought  a 
newspaper  and  entered  the  hotel. 

He  was  not  as  shabby  as  usual;  he  had  just 
bought  himself  a  summer  suit — at  a  reduced  price 
because  it  was  late  in  the  season.  But  the  head 
waiter  was  not  to  be  deceived  by  new  ready-made 
clothes.  He  seated  Murdock  at  the  least  desirable 
table  in  the  room,  far  from  the  windows,  near  the 
pantry  door,  with  his  back  to  the  girl  whom  be 
had  seen  from  the  street.  And  Murdock  did  not 
turn  round  for  a  second  look  at  her.  He  occupied 
himself  with  his  newspaper,  and  particularly  with 
the  stock  reports,  which  he  had  begun  to  study 
in  his  search  for  a  good  investment. 

He  remembers  that  when  his  beefsteak  arrived 
he  was  convinced  that  he  ought  to  buy  Bethlehem 
Steel.  He  does  not  remember  when  he  got  the  idea. 

The  girl  from  the  window,  leaving  the  dining- 
room,  paused  at  the  door  to  look  back  at  him,  but 

[160] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

he  did  not  see  her.  She  even  returned,  on  the  pre- 
text of  having  forgotten  her  gloves,  and  stared  at 
him  as  she  came  in,  and  glanced  back  over  her 
shoulder  as  she  went  out;  but  he  continued  ab- 
sorbed in  his  newspaper.  After  she  had  disappeared 
he  looked  up  quickly,  as  if  some  one  had  spoken  to 
him;  and  he  gazed  around  him  bewildered  at  the 
tables  near.  No  one  was  even  noticing  him.  He 
paid  his  check  and  wandered  out.  And  next  day 
he  drew  two  thousand  dollars  of  his  savings  from 
the  bank  and  bought  Bethlehem  Steel. 

Throughout  that  fall  and  winter  the  war  orders 
from  abroad  kept  his  steel  stocks  rising,  and  he 
followed  them  cautiously,  gambling  on  a  margin, 
halving  his  winnings,  and  adding  a  thousand  dol- 
lars at  a  time  to  his  savings  account.  By  the  fol- 
lowing May  he  had  thirty  thousand  dollars  in  sight, 
and  this,  he  figured,  was  enough  for  him  to  live  on. 
He  sold  all  his  stocks.  He  resigned  his  position 
at  Perry-Felton's.  He  packed  his  books  in  barrels 
and  all  his  clothes  in  his  suit-case.  And,  telling 
his  landlady  that  he  was  going  on  a  holiday,  he 
walked  out  of  the  apartment-house  at  eight  o'clock 
at  night — empty-handed,  but  with  five  hundred 
dollars  in  his  pocket — and  turned  toward  the  Hud- 
son River  and  the  Jersey  ferry. 

13 

By  ten  o'clock  he  was  passing  the  City  Hall  in 
Newark.  By  midnight  he  was  lying  under  a  tree 

[161] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


beside  the  Seven  Bridges  Road,  as  happy  as  a 
country  dog  that  had  escaped  to  the  open  fields. 
He  sat  up  to  see  the  dawn,  and  he  remained  gazing 
about  him  for  at  least  an  hour,  his  knees  drawn  up 
to  his  chin  and  his  arms  clasped  about  them  in 
the  attitude  in  which  he  used  to  sit  in  his  father's 
pasture-lot  watching  the  cows.  He  had  a  curious 
feeling.  He  felt  as  if  he  had  been  imprisoned 
among  people  for  all  these  years,  and  had  at  last 
escaped  to  the  trees  and  weeds  and  grasses  that 
were  his  proper  equals  and  companions. 

He  made  his  breakfast  of  rolls  and  milk  in 
Springfield,  and,  swinging  along  the  road  to  the 
Washington  Valley,  with  his  hat  in  his  hand  and 
his  coat  over  his  shoulder — about  half  past  eight — 
he  saw  a  large  automobile  approaching.  It  slowed 
down.  It  stopped  before  him.  He  saw  that  the 
girl  who  was  driving  it  was  smiling  at  him.  "You 
don't  remember  me,'*  she  said. 

No,  he  didn't.  But  he  continued  to  look  at 
her,  without  surprise,  feeling  friendly  and  unpuzzled. 

She  asked,  "Did  you  buy  Bethlehem  Steel?" 

He  dropped  his  coat  and  hat  and  came  to  the 
side  of  the  machine,  gazing  at  her  with  a  deep- 
eyed,  hypnotized  interest.  "How  did  you  know 
about  that?" 

She  continued  to  smile  down  at  him.  "Don't 
you  remember?  You  saw  me  dining  at  the  window, 
and  you  came  into  the  hotel,  but  you  didn't  look 
at  me." 

[162] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

Some  recollection  of  the  incident  returned  to 
him  dimly  while  he  studied  her.  She  was  bare- 
headed, and  the  morning  sun  shone  full  in  her  face. 
It  seemed  to  him  that  he  had  known  her — some- 
where. "Of  course,"  he  said.  "I  didn't  recognize 
you." 

"You  don't  recognize  me  yet,"  she  replied. 

No.    He  couldn't  really  say  that  he  did. 

She  explained,  "I  don't  think  you  ever  knew 
my  name." 

"No."    He  could  not  place  her. 

"Do  you  remember,"  she  helped  him,  "once  when 
you  were  whipped,  hi  school,  for  guessing  the  figures 
on  the  blackboard?" 

He  blinked  at  her.  She  waited  confidently. 
"Was  thai  you?"  he  asked.  "At  the  back  of  the 
room?" 

She  nodded,  enjoying  it,  as  soberly  mischievous 
as  a  child  with  some  little  mystification  of  its  own. 
"And  I  spoke  to  you,  afterward,  on  your  way 
home." 

"I  remember."  His  own  expression  had  become 
boyish  and  frank  and  friendly.  "Did  you  tell  me 
what  the  figures  were — the  first  time?" 

"Yes.  And  then  I  got  frightened  and  couldn't 
tell  you  what  the  second  ones  were.  That's  what  I 
tried  to  explain  to  you — afterward." 

"I  remember,"  he  said.  "I  didn't  understand. 
I  thought  I'd  just  guessed  them."  And  then,  after 
a  long  smiling  pause  of  thoughtful  silence,  he 

[163] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


added,  "And  that's  where  I  got  the  idea  of  buying 
Bethlehem  Steel,  is  it?" 

He  was  talking  to  her,  now,  as  if  their  meeting 
were  quite  natural  and  commonplace — as  if  they 
were  in  a  dream  in  which  the  impossible  could 
happen  as  a  matter  of  course. 

She  had  that  air  herself.  "I  tried  awfully  hard 
in  the  hotel  to  make  you  turn  around  and  look  at 
me,"  she  confessed.  "I  even  came  back  into  the 
dining-room,  but  you  never  noticed.  Father  had 
been  buying  steel,  and  when  I  saw  that  you  were 
looking  at  the  stock  quotations  I  tried  to  give 
you  a  tip." 

"I  made  thirty  thousand  dollars  on  it." 

"And  you're  coming  back  to  Wauchock?" 

"Yes.    Did  you  suggest  that  to  me,  too?" 

"No."  She  opened  the  car  door  to  him.  "But 
when  I  woke  this  morning  I  had  a  funny  feeling 
that  you  were  on  your  way.  I  thought  I  might 
meet  you." 

He  climbed  in  quite  unconsciously  and  sat  be- 
side her.  "I've  left  the  city.  I'm  coming  out  here 
to  farm." 

"On  the  old  place?" 

"Yes.  It's  queer,"  he  said,  "that  I  don't  re- 
member your  name." 

"No,"  she  assured  him.  "I  don't  think  you  ever 
knew  it.  The  first  time  I  saw  you  you  were  having 
your  toothache  cured  by  that  Buffalo  Bill  man  who 
sold  the  patent  medicine.  Then  you  came  to  school 

[164] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

at  Wauchock,  but  I  don't  think  you  ever  noticed 
me.  And  then  we  moved  to  Centerbrook,  and  I 
didn't  see  you  again  till  you  came  to  school  there. 
I'm  Ruth  Young." 

He  did  not  remember  ever  having  heard  the 
name  before.  "It  doesn't  matter,"  he  said. 

He  was  gazing  at  her  in  a  way  that  he  had  never 
looked  at  any  one  in  his  life  before.  During  all 
those  years  of  silence  and  solitariness  at  Wauchock, 
at  Centerbrook,  in  New  York,  he  had  never  spoken 
to  any  one  as  he  was  speaking  to  her  or  found  any 
one  who  could  meet  his  eyes  in  complete  and  friendly 
sincerity  as  she  met  them.  And  the  strange  thing 
was  that  now  it  seemed  as  if  she  had  shared  in  all 
those  years  as  an  invisible  companion,  who  had 
suddenly  appeared  to  him,  who  was  sitting  beside 
him  and  smiling  at  him  as  she  had  in  some  way 
been  watching  him  and  smiling  at  him,  unseen, 
always,  even  from  his  boyhood. 

Perhaps  it  was  the  thought  of  what  had  kept 
him  solitary  that  made  him  ask,  "Did  you  know 
about  my  father?" 

And  it  was  certainly  the  tone  in  which  he  asked 
it  that  made  her,  for  the  first  time,  glance  away 
from  him  as  she  replied:  "Yes.  There  was  a  lot 
of  gossip  about  it." 

He  said,  "I'm  glad." 

She  understood;  he  was  glad  that  there  was  not 
even  this  secret  concealed  from  her;  that  she  knew 
it  and  was  not  ashamed  of  him.  She  put  out  her 

[165] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


hand  to  him  blindly,  to  reassure  him.  He  took  it 
as  simply  as  she  gave  it. 

She  settled  back  in  the  seat  with  a  little  trembling 
sigh.  There  were  tears  in  her  eyes,  but  she  gazed 
through  them,  smiling,  at  the  long  empty  road  and 
the  long  empty  past.  "I've  motored  by  your  house," 
she  said,  "but  it  was  always  closed." 

He  had  lifted  her  hand  and  bent  down  to  it  and 
put  his  cheek  against  it,  with  his  face  averted.  She 
slipped  her  fingers  out  of  his  and  turned  his  head  to 
her  and  held  him  so,  looking  at  him,  all  smiling 
tears  and  tenderness,  with  eyes  that  at  once 
searched  him  and  accepted  him  and  surrendered 
to  him.  Suddenly,  as  if  he  were  unable  to  bear  it, 
he  bowed  forward,  with  his  face  in  his  hands.  She 
patted  his  head,  weeping  happily,  and  distractedly 
stroking  his  hair. 

"Isn't  it  strange?"  she  said.  "The  first  time  I 
saw  you,  alone,  on  that  platform,  under  the  torch- 
light, I  had  almost  the  same  feeling  for  you.  And 
I  told  you  those  figures  on  the  blackboard  just  as 
if  I  were  talking  to  myself,  and  I  knew  you'd  hear. 
And  then  they  sent  me  away  to  school  and  I  lost 
you,  but  somehow  I  always  knew  you'd  come  back. 
Even  when — there  was  some  one  else  that —  I 
don't  know.  I  think  it  was  only  because  he  seemed 
like  you.  And  the  moment  I  saw  you  passing  the 
restaurant  window  I  knew  I  had  been  cheating 
myself.  And  I  brought  you  into  the  hotel  and  told 
you  to  buy  the  stock.  And  then  I  began  to  worry  be- 

[166] 


BENJAMIN    McNEIL    MURDOCK 

cause  I  hadn't  been  able  to  make  you  look  around. 
And  father's  dead.  And  I've  been  so  lonely.  I 
began  to  be  afraid.  I  was  so  happy  when  I  woke 
this  morning  and  knew  you  were  coming."  She 
even  laughed  brokenly.  "Get  your  coat  and  hat. 
I  want  to  see  our —  I  want  to  see  the  house  " 

14 

And  that  is  their  story.  I  don't  know  what  to 
make  of  it,  any  more  than  I  know  what  to  make 
of  Murdock's  disproof  of  the  mechanistic  theory 
and  his  belief  that  the  plants  themselves  have  a 
creative  intelligence  and  some  sort  of  dumb  world- 
soul  of  their  own.  But  I  know  this:  hearing  those 
two,  watching  them,  seeing  the  deep  and  smiling 
trust  of  their  way  of  looking  at  each  other  while 
they  spoke  and  listened — and  remembering  that 
weedy  life  of  poverty  and  ignorance  and  murder 
and  kleptomania  from  which  he  came — I  felt  that 
I  could  believe  any  miracle  of  the  immortal  spirit, 
any  mysticism  of  the  creative  intelligence,  any 
hope  of  the  transcending  soul.  Science  may  say 
what  it  pleases  of  Benjamin  McNeil  Murdock.  He 
is,  to  me,  his  own  disproof  of  a  dead  mechanical 
world  and  the  philosophy  of  the  microscope. 

12 


FROM   THE   LIFE 

Conrad  Norman 


CONRAD  NORMAN 


HIS  real  name  is  not  Conrad  Norman.  It  is 
Con  Gorman,  and  he  was  born  in  Center- 
brook,  New  Jersey.  So,  I  think,  was  Flora  Furness. 
At  any  rate,  they  both  grew  up  there  from  child- 
hood as  neighbors — although  they  were  by  no  means 
neighborly. 

There  are  two  kinds  of  human  beings  in  Center- 
brook.  Each  is  sustained  by  a  feeling  of  superiority 
to  the  other;  and  this  feeling  of  superiority  has 
doubtless  been  provided  by  an  all-wise  Nature  to 
enable  each  to  endure  with  indifference  the  other's 
self-conceit.  The  native  Centerbrooker  regards 
the  commuter  as  a  Parisian  regards  a  member  of 
the  American  colony  in  Paris — or  as  a  member  of 
that  colony  regards  an  American  tourist  there — 
or  as  any  one  who  is  comparatively  permanent, 
and  in  possession,  regards  the  passing  and  the 
transitory.  And  the  commuter — living  in  Center- 
brook  because  "New  York  is  no  place  to  bring  up 
a  young  family" — regards  the  native  Center- 
brooker as  the  summer  visitor  in  the  Catskills  re- 
gards the  buckwheater  and  the  local  village  life, 
or  as  any  one  who  is  progressively  transient  regards 

[ni] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


the  permanent  and  rooted.  Humanity,  as  the 
philosopher  says,  is  "like  that."  It  is  one  of  hu- 
manity's compensations  for  being  so  human. 

Con  Gorman  was  in  the  rooted  camp  because  his 
father  kept  the  bakery  on  Front  Street,  near  the 
railway  station.  Flora  Furness  was  of  the  com- 
muters' circle  because  her  father  took  the  8.25  to 
the  city  every  morning.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
neither  the  Germans  nor  the  Furnesses  were  spir- 
itually at  home  in  the  tents  of  their  respective  fac- 
tions. They  were  only  more  antipathetic  to  each 
other  than  they  were  to  their  economic  kind.  Noth- 
ing in  the  newspapers  could  have  sounded  less  likely 
to  Centerbrook  than  the  possibility  that  a  daugh- 
ter of  the  Furnesses  would  ever  look  twice  at  a  son 
of  the  Germans.  The  head-line,  "Screen  Star  Weds 
Peeress,"  would  not  have  puckered  many  mouths 
in  Centerbrook.  But  "Con  Gorman  Weds  Flora 
Furness"!  That  would  certainly  have  started 
whistles  enough  to  bring  out  the  Ivy  Hook  and 
Ladder  Company. 

For  my  part,  the  first  time  I  saw  Con  even  speak 
to  her  I  thought  that  I  had  turned  his  head. 

2 

It  was  at  a  concert  and  dance  given  at  the 
Centerbrook  Country  Club  in  aid  of  the  Belgian 
Relief  Fund.  I  had  just  seen  him  act  in  a  little 
sketch  that  was  part  of  the  concert,  and  he  played 
his  role  so  engagingly  that  it  was  evident  he  had 

[ml 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


dramatic  talent.  There  is  no  mistaking  it  in  a 
boy  of  nineteen.  It  is  too  rare  to  be  overlooked. 
When  the  concert,  was  finished  and  the  room  was 
being  cleared  for  the  dance  I  hunted  him  out  in 
the  crowd  on  the  club-house  veranda  and  proposed 
that  he  should  let  me  give  him  a  letter  to  a  play- 
wright who,  I  knew,  was  in  need  of  a  juvenile. 
We  were  still  shaking  hands  when  I  said  it,  and  his 
gratitude  was  so  violent  that  he  all  but  wrung  blood 
from  my  finger-ends. 

"Really?"  he  said,  half  choked.  "Will  you? 
Gee!"  And  the  rest  strangled  in  his  throat. 

I  tried  to  explain  that  I  was  not  doing  him  a 
favor  so  much  as  I  was  doing  the  playwright  one; 
that  the  movies  had  taken  so  many  presentable 
juveniles  off  the  stage  that  there  was  little  left  but 
Romeos  in  false  teeth  and  toupees.  "If  you  do  as 
well  at  rehearsals  as  you  did  here,"  I  assured  him, 
"Bidey  '11  probably  adopt  you — to  keep  them  from 
buying  you  away." 

"Really?"  he  cried.  "Was  I  all  right?  Gee!" 
He  strained  at  my  hand  again.  "Gee!  Wait  a 
minute!"  And  he  turned  to  buck  his  way  back 
through  the  crowd  as  if  I  had  passed  him  the 
football  in  a  scrimmage  and  he  was  going  through 
the  line  for  a  touchdown. 

He  was  a  handsome  boy,  with  an  entire  lack  of 
self -consciousness.  It  was  this  lack  that  had  struck 
me  in  his  performance.  It  had  shown  not  only  in 
his  voice,  and  his  face,  and  his  hands,  but  also  in 

[173] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


his  legs,  where  the  constraint  of  the  young  actor 
stiffens  and  struts  even  after  he  has  eased  it  up 
everywhere  else.  When  his  friends  in  the  audience 
tpplauded  his  entrance  he  grinned  genially,  and  his 
grin  was  just  as  contagious  then  as  it  is  now.  As 
soon  as  he  began  to  speak  his  lines  his  voice  took 
all  the  innumerable  sliding  gradations  of  a  conver- 
sational tone,  and  it  seemed  impossible  that  he 
could  do  such  a  thing  without  training,  yet  his 
accent  was  quite  obviously  untrained.  His  r's 
were  ferocious. 

They  did  not  matter.  I  had  understood  that  the 
r61e  of  the  boy  in  my  friend's  play  was  not  a  straight 
part. 

In  a  few  minutes  Con  came  rushing  back  to  me  to 
explain  that  he  was  not  really  an  actor;  that  he 
had  done  only  amateur  stunts;  that  he  sang  and 
danced,  chiefly;  that  he  had  never  thought  of 
getting  a  part  in  a  real  play — only  in  musical 
comedy — and  he  had  never  been  able  to  "break  in" 
there.  I  promised  to  write  a  letter  of  introduction 
and  mail  it  to  him  early  in  the  morning.  He  bolted 
away  again.  He  was  in  a  pathetic  state  of  pale 
excitement. 

"Too  bad!"  said  the  man  with  whom  I  had  been 
talking.  "Nice  boy,  too!" 

"What's  too  bad  about  him?" 

"No  good  for  anything,"  he  said.  He  was  the 
proprietor  of  the  coal-yards  on  Leedy  Street.  "Par- 
ents' fault." 

[174] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


"What's  he  been  doing  now?" 

"That's  the  trouble.  He's  not  doing  anything. 
He's  never  done  an  honest  day's  work  in  his  life, 
and  I  don't  believe  he  ever  will.  Huh!  I  see  we 
have  the  stuffed-heart  aristocracy  with  us." 


He  was  referring  to  the  Furnesses  as  "the  stuffed- 
heart  aristocracy." 

The  entertainment  was  a  charity  affair,  and 
therefore  open  to  any  one  who  had  a  dollar;  but, 
for  that  very  reason,  we  had  not  expected  the 
Furnesses  to  come.  We  forgot  that  the  Belgians 
might  be  regarded  as  under  the  special  protection 
of  the  British  flag.  There  was  a  copper-bronzed 
and  curly-headed  young  Englishman  with  Flora. 
He  looked  like  a  naval  officer.  I  heard  later  that 
he  was  Lieut.  Cuthbert  Williamson,  of  the 
Atlantic  Squadron. 

And  my  coal  magnate  referred  to  the  Furnesses 
as  "the  stuffed-heart  aristocracy"  because  they 
were  known  to  be  as  poor  as  they  were  considered 
"snooty."  They  had  no  motor-car.  They  kept  no 
servants.  They  were  such  notoriously  "slow  pay" 
that  they  could  not  get  credit  even  at  the  news- 
stand on  the  railway  platform  when  they  were  in 
a  hurry  to  catch  a  train.  They  never  entertained. 
The  butcher  reported  that  they  bought  chiefly 
beef  hearts  (hence  the  stuffed-heart  aristocracy). 
The  grocer  added,  "And  bushels  o'  turnips."  And, 

[175] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


as  if  to  make  themselves  wholly  ridiculous,  they 
always  dressed  for  dinner.  The  town  was  full  of 
stories  of  how  Mrs.  Furness  cooked  in  an  evening 
gown,  and  Albert  Edward,  her  husband,  after  din- 
ner, lighted  a  post-prandial  clay  pipe  of  army  cut, 
and  smoked  solemnly  in  his  "soup-and-fish."  Some 
one,  on  a  midwinter  evening,  had  seen  Flora,  with 
her  bare  arms  goose-fleshed  in  a  frozen  drawing- 
room,  trying  to  keep  herself  warm  by  playing 
Beethoven  sonatas,  while  her  brother,  Howard 
Hartley  Furness,  twisted  old  newspapers  into  solid 
wads  and  fed  them  into  the  fireplace  to  encourage 
the  cannel-coal. 

I  suspect  that  the  "some  one"  who  saw  this  was 
a  younger  Gorman,  spying  through  a  crack  in  the 
closed  shutters  of  the  Furness  front  window.  They 
lived  under  a  common  roof — the  Germans  and  the 
Furnesses — in  the  old  Voss  house,  on  the  corner  of 
High  and  Leedy  streets,  the  Furnesses  having  a 
front  door  on  High  Street  and  the  Gormans  using 
what  had  once  been  a  side  door  and  veranda  on 
Leedy.  Their  lawns  were  separated  by  a  class 
barrier  in  the  shape  of  an  old  lilac  hedge,  planted 
by  the  last  of  the  Vosses,  Miss  Elizabeth  Voss, 
when  she  had  been  compelled  to  rent  hah*  her  resi- 
dence in  order  to  be  able  to  live  in  the  other  half. 
She  had  divided  the  house  with  a  series  of  sound- 
proof walls,  filled  with  sawdust.  She  had  cut  the 
back  yard  in  two  with  a  spite-fence  high  enough 
to  discourage  any  social  aspiration.  And  although 

[176] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


she  was  now  dead,  and  buried  exclusively,  her  work 
remained  unchanged. 

On  the  High  Street  side  of  the  house  there  were 
still  shuttered  windows  and  a  sun-blistered,  weather- 
crackled,  high-eyebrowed,  old  colonnade  porch  that 
was  prouder  than  paint.  Behind  their  street  hedge 
the  Furnesses  could  drink  afternoon  tea  under  the 
Voss  elms,  safe  from  the  intruding  curiosity  of  any 
but  neighborly  mosquitoes — and  Mrs.  Furness 
rather  managed  to  make  them  part  of  the  function 
by  calling  them  "midges."  (Have  I  said  that  the 
Furnesses  came  from  Bury,  near  Houghton,  in 
Sussex?)  Their  front  door  still  had  its  prim  Voss 
air  of  being  unapproachable  to  any  one  who  had 
not  been  formally  introduced — an  air  of  never 
having  extended  its  bell-pull  to  the  fingers  of  the 
great  ungloved.  Occasionally,  as  you  passed  the 
gate  in  the  hedge,  you  overheard  the  antique  Fur- 
ness  piano  articulating  faintly  in  a  high,  precise, 
soprano  tinkle.  There  was  not  another  sound. 
Whereas,  on  the  Leedy  Street  side  of  the  house — 
where  there  was  no  hedge — the  whole  brood  of 
Germans  lived  with  unshuttered  windows  opening 
on  a  public  veranda,  and  sang  and  pounded  the 
piano,  and  danced  to  the  phonograph,  and  quar- 
reled and  smacked  one  another  and  played  rough- 
house  games  as  noisily  as  a  kennel  of  young  Aire- 
dales. 

High  Street  still  had  some  claim  to  residential 
respectability,  although  one  house  had  been  rented 

[177] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


for  a  public  library,  two  were  boarding-houses,  and 
another  had  put  on  a  false  front  and  become  a 
milliner's  shop.  But  Leedy  Street  was  beyond  the 
pale.  There  was  not  only  a  livery-stable  on  it; 
there  was  a  plumber's  shop,  a  coal-yard,  and  a 
brick  terrace  where  day-laborers  lived.  It  was  not 
to  be  expected  that  a  family  on  High  Street  would 
associate  with  one  on  Leedy,  even  though  their 
dormer-windows  gabled  out  of  the  one  roof. 

And  the  Furnesses  did  not  really  associate  with 
any  one  in  Centerbrook.  They  lived  in  the  same 
general  world  as  the  other  commuters,  belonged  dis- 
tantly to  the  same  country  club,  played  silent  golf 
on  the  same  club  links,  and  prayed  regularly  to  the 
same  Deity.  But,  under  Providence,  all  their  aims 
in  life  were  as  palpably  alien  to  the  Centerbrook 
commuters  as  the  Gorman  aimlessness  was  repel- 
lent to  the  coal-yard  proprietor. 


To  him  the  Furnesses  were  "the  stuffed-heart 
aristocracy"  and  Con  was  "no  good  for  anything." 
He  had  all  a  Benjamin  Franklin's  practical  contempt 
for  them  both.  Out  of  that  contempt  he  proceeded 
to  tell  me  why  he  had  discharged  Con  after  a  week's 
trial  in  his  coal-office.  I  was  confused  by  a  vague 
recollection  of  a  report  that  Con  had  said  he  was 
fired  for  refusing  to  give  a  customer  short  weight. 
Centerbrook  is  full  of  such  gossip  about  its  shop- 
keepers. It  is  the  way  the  impotent  commuter 

[178] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


takes  his  revenge  on  the  high  cost  of  living.  I 
avoided  looking  at  the  coal-man. 

Flora  Furness  caught  my  wandering  eye,  across 
the  veranda,  and  she  gave  me  not  exactly  a  smile, 
but  at  least  a  facial  movement  of  friendly  recog- 
nition. Her  mother  had  discovered  that  I  had  once 
visited  a  member  of  the  artist  colony  in  Amberley, 
which  is  beside  the  river  Arun,  opposite  Bury; 
and,  though  I  had  never  been  in  Bury  itself,  I  had 
stood  on  the  downs  above  Amberley  and  seen  the 
spire  of  Bury  church  among  the  trees  across  the 
river  and  the  weald.  It  gave  me  a  standing  with 
the  Furnesses  that  no  one  else  in  Centerbrook 
could  approach. 

The  next  thing  I  saw  was  Con  Gorman  speaking 
to  Flora  Furness.  And,  as  I  say,  I  thought  that  I 
had  turned  his  young  head. 

She  was  standing  near  the  veranda  door,  between 
her  mother  and  Lieutenant  Williamson.  The  music 
had  struck  up,  inside;  the  dancers  were  streaming 
past  her  in  answer  to  its  call,  and  Con  had  stopped, 
incredibly,  to  ask  her  for  a  dance.  At  least  I  judged 
that  was  what  had  happened.  I  could  not  see  his 
face,  but  I  could  see  hers  and  her  mother's  and 
Williamson's. 

Mrs.  Furness  wore  her  hair  like  the  Dowager 
Queen  Alexander,  whom  she  respectfully  resembled; 
she  was  holding  herself  regally  erect,  high-shoul- 
dered, with  her  hands  clasped  on  her  stomacher,  so 
to  speak;  and  her  expression  had  calmly  obliter- 

[179] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


ated  Con  Gorman  from  the  surrounding  cosmos 
by  an  act  of  will.  Williamson's  face  I  did  not  under- 
stand till  I  met  him  later;  he  had,  in  fact,  the 
absent-minded  eyes  of  young  Europe,  gravely 
condemned  to  death  and  watching  contemporary 
America  dance  to  rag-time.  Having  regarded  Con 
a  moment  blankly,  he  shifted  the  same  regard  to  a 
passing  couple. 

As  for  Flora  Furness,  she  seemed,  at  first,  natu- 
rally, surprised  at  Con.  She  smiled  a  formal,  polite 
refusal.  He  persisted.  She  glanced  at  her  mother 
and  then  darted  a  look  at  him  that  confessed — 
I  did  not  know  what.  It  was  an  alarmed,  reluctant, 
warning  look.  It  was  a  look  as  of  conspiracy  be- 
trayed. And  it  was  so  evidently  private  that  I 
turned  away  at  once  as  if  I  had  been  spying. 

I  found  that  the  coal-dealer  was  refuting  an 
editorial  allegation  that  coal-dealers  had  caused  the 
rise  in  the  price  of  coal.  When  I  looked  at  Flora 
Furness  again  she  was  talking  to  Williamson,  with 
her  eyes  fixed  on  me.  Con  had  disappeared.  For 
a  moment  I  thought  guiltily  that  she  was  studying 
me  to  see  what  I  had  noticed.  Then  I  understood 
that  she  wished  to  speak  to  me. 

I  made  a  strategic  retreat  from  the  labor  war  in 
the  Pennsylvania  coal-fields  and  moved  toward  her 
with  the  current  that  was  being  sucked  in  to  the 
music.  It  seemed  impossible  that  Con  could  have 
told  her  what  I  had  said  about  his  acting.  Why 
should  he?  And  yet  why,  otherwise,  should  she 

[180] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


summon  me  in  this  way?  And — most  of  all — why 
the  look  that  she  had  shot  at  him?  What  was 
going  on  between  them? 

When  I  had  been  recognized  and  greeted  by  her 
mother  and  her  she  said  that  she  wanted  me  to 
meet  Lieutenant  Williamson.  That  was  pleasant 
but  unilluminating.  The  lieutenant  was  equally 
so.  I  was  not  piqued,  but  I  had  once  talked  to  a 
silent  Englishman  about  the  Boer  War  for  two 
garrulous  hours  before  I  learned  that  he  had  served 
as  an  officer  through  the  whole  campaign;  and  I 
promised  myself  that  Williamson  might  be  as 
amiably  illuminating  as  he  pleased,  he  should  not 
betray  me  into  trying  to  enlighten  him  about  the 
British  navy.  I  turned  my  intelligence  on  her. 

We  talked  of  the  concert  condescendingly.  "I've 
just  discovered  an  actor,"  I  said,  "a  born  actor." 

That  was  an  inspiration.  There  had  been  but 
one  dramatic  number  in  the  concert,  and  her  eyes 
at  once  betrayed  her.  She  had  a  clear  young  pallor 
that  did  not  speak  well  for  stuffed  heart  and  tur- 
nips as  a  health  food,  and  that  pallor  slowly  red- 
dened. "Isn't  it  warm?"  she  said.  It  was  not  par- 
ticularly warm.  "Could  we  find  a  cool  drink?" 
We  could. 

The  Furnesses  were  stanch  in  their  English 
aversion  to  ice- water,  and  her  mother  showed  some 
incredulous  surprise,  but  before  she  could  move  to 
arrest  her  daughter  we  were  through  the  door. 

The  girl  took  my  arm.    "I  saw  you  talking  to 

1181] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


him,"  she  said,  quickly,  under  her  voice.    "What  is 
it?    What  has  happened?" 


I  was  as  much  taken  aback  as  if  a  marble  Venus 
had  suddenly  turned  its  sculptured  head  to  me  and 
spoken  breathlessly.  It  was  Con  Gorman  of  whom 
she  was  speaking.  I  could  believe  that  Con  might 
have  stood  outside  the  railing  and  gazed  up  rever- 
ently at  the  placid  face  of  the  goddess,  but  I  could 
not  believe  that  the  Olympian  eyes  had  ever  been 
lowered  to  look  at  him.  She  held  her  head  high 
while  she  asked  me  about  him.  She  was  of  that 
statuesque  type  of  gray-eyed  English  beauty  of 
which  Du  Maurier  loved  to  make  architectural 
drawings. 

I  repeated  what  I  had  said  to  Con.  It  did  not 
seem  adequate  to  her.  "But  he  was  so  excited," 
she  murmured.  We  were  making  our  way  across 
the  semi-baronial  hall  of  the  Country  Club,  in  the 
general  direction  of  the  fruit  punch.  And  suddenly 
she  deflected  me  toward  the  side  veranda.  "It's 
so  hot,"  she  said,  hurriedly.  "I  feel  almost  faint." 

I  understood  that  she  had  seen  Con — as  I  had — 
coming  to  intercept  us.  She  escorted  me  rapidly 
outdoors,  and  down  the  deserted  porch  to  the  back 
steps  and  out  across  the  lawn  toward  the  tennis- 
courts.  "I  want  to  speak  to  him,"  she  said, 
"alone";  and  she  stopped  me  with  a  hand  on  my 
arm  and  went  on  into  the  darkness  without  me. 

[182] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


She  must  have  known  that  Con  was  right  behind 
us,  although  she  had  not  turned  her  head,  and  he, 
in  his  dancing-pumps,  had  not  made  a  footfall 
audible  to  me.  He  shot  past  me  instantly  and  over- 
took her.  I  heard  him  say:  "Is  it  true?  Are  you 
going  to — " 

Was  it  "marry  him  "? 

It  sounded  like  "marry  him  "!  And  his  tone  was 
agonized. 

I  turned  back  to  the  porch  and  sat  down  on  the 
steps,  under  an  electric  light,  and  consulted  a 
cigarette. 

I  did  not  share  the  prejudices  of  Centerbrook, 
but  the  more  I  thought  over  the  situation  the  more 
impossible  it  appeared.  Con  was  simply  the  ne'er- 
do-well  son  of  a  drunken  Irish  baker  whose  business 
was  held  together  by  his  wife  and  his  daughters. 
Con  had  once  helped  them  by  driving  the  wagon 
and  delivering  the  bread,  but  of  recent  years  he 
had  not  done  even  that.  He  had  worked  for  a  week 
in  the  coal-office.  He  had  been  a  clerk  for  at  least 
two  weeks  in  the  grocery.  He  had  tended  the  soda- 
fountain  in  the  druggist's  for  perhaps  a  month. 
And  there  had  been  a  period  when  it  was  under- 
stood that  he  was  employed  in  New  York.  But, 
though  he  had  no  conspicuous  vices,  he  had  a  cheer- 
ful irresponsibility  that  unfitted  him  for  commercial 
life.  He  treated  the  grocery,  the  coal-office,  and  the 
drug-store  as  if  their  businesses  were  suffering  from 
a  lack  of  gaiety  that  could  be  supplied  by  bright 

13  [ 188  ] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


impertinences  and  practical  jokes.  The  till  at  the 
family  bake-shop  being  open  to  him  always,  he 
was  never  without  pocket-money.  He  dressed 
smartly.  He  was  the  spark  of  life  in  any  party 
that  included  him.  He  was  a  high  favorite  among 
many  of  the  young  people  of  Centerbrook.  But 
their  wise  elders  waited,  not  too  patiently,  to  see 
him  come  to  his  inevitable  bad  end. 

Among  those  whose  frowns  were  expectantly 
prophetic  I  could  not  imagine  the  Furnesses.  They 
must  have  been  merely  unaware  of  his  existence. 
And  how  he  had  managed  to  come  to  speaking 
terms  with  Flora  Furness  was  not  to  be  learned  from 
a  cigarette.  Yet  there  they  both  were — dimly  to 
be  seen  on  a  bench  under  the  trees  beside  the  tennis- 
courts — in  the  animated  intimacy  of  secret  conver- 
sation. She  was  seated  immovably,  with  her  back 
to  me,  and  he  was  turned  sideways  toward  her, 
talking  rapidly  and  running  his  hand  up  through 
his  hair.  I  tried  not  to  notice  them,  but  I  could 
not  help  seeing  his  arm  go  up  and  then  out,  every 
now  and  then,  in  a  passionate  gesticulation. 

It  was  undoubtedly  some  sort  of  clandestine 
love-affair.  And  yet,  of  course,  it  could  not  be. 
I  could  believe  it  was  while  I  was  looking  at  them, 
but  when  I  looked  away  it  was  incredible.  It  was 
like  seeing  a  ghost  and  turning  from  it  to  blink 
at  its  familiar  surroundings  and  say  to  yourself, 
"There  must  be  something  the  matter  with  my 
eyes." 

1184] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


I  ended  by  keeping  my  attention  fixed  on  my 
cigarette,  as  you  might  feel  that  if  you  did  not 
notice  your  ghost  it  would  disappear.  After 
all,  no  one  in  Centerbrook  would  have  credited 
the  report  of  such  an  intimacy.  If  I  refused  to 
see  it,  it  was  as  good  as  non-existent.  I  refused 
to  see  it. 

I  refused  even  when  the  girl  returned  alone, 
almost  running,  in  an  agitation  which  I  could  not 
avoid  hearing  in  her  shaken  breathing.  I  rose  with- 
out looking  at  her,  and  followed  her  up  the  porch, 
and  hastened  to  open  the  screen-door  for  her,  dis- 
creetly silent.  She  controlled  herself  with  diffi- 
culty, facing  the  crowded  hall.  I  did  not  try  to 
help  her.  I  was  afraid  of  intruding.  We  crossed 
the  room  without  a  word. 

As  we  approached  the  other  door  she  said,  after 
a  struggle,  in  a  tone  of  shamed  desperation:  "Please 
take  him  away.  Don't  let  him  come  to — to  speak 
to  me  again.  I'll  tell  them  I  feel  ill.  Don't  stay  to 
talk  to  them.  Take  him  home." 

Her  distress  was  painful.  I  hastened  to  assure 
her:  "Yes,  yes.  I'll  fix  it.  Don't  worry.  It  '11 
be  all  right" — remorseful  because  I  had  not  offered 
some  approach  to  the  subject  in  order  to  make  it 
easier  for  her  to  speak  of  it. 

We  were  at  the  door.  As  I  reached  for  it  she 
faltered  out,  with  extraordinary  poignancy:  "Be — 
Be — kind  to  him." 

I  was  afraid  that  she  was  going  to  break  down, 

[185] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


and  I  fumbled  blindly  with  the  door-knob,  fright- 
ened and  embarrassed,  whispering  to  her,  "Don't 
— don't — "  unable  to  look  at  her. 

She  did  not  answer.  I  drew  the  door  open.  She 
passed  me  and  went  out.  On  the  veranda  she  gave 
me  her  hand  in  a  hasty  parting,  her  eyes  averted. 
"Thank  you,"  she  said,  in  a  clear,  controlled  voice. 
"I  feel  much  better.  Goodnight."  And  as  I  turned 
back  I  heard  her  tell  her  mother:  "I've  been  feel- 
ing quite  faint.  I  think  we'd  better  go." 

6 

I  went,  rather  dazed,  to  look  for  Con.  And  I 
found  him  on  the  bench  where  she  had  left  him, 
facing  the  night.  I  spoke  to  him,  without  reply, 
and  sat  down  beside  him,  and  struck  a  match  to 
light  another  cigarette.  I  did  not  light  it.  Glancing 
at  him  furtively  in  the  small  flare  of  the  match,  I 
saw  that  he  was  crying — his  face  drenched  with 
tears — crying  silently,  his  mouth  open,  his  jaws 
trembling,  his  eyes  staring,  unconscious  of  himself 
or  of  me.  It  was  not  the  audible  grief  of  revolt 
or  self-pity.  It  was  the  mute  suffering  of  complete 
bereavement  and  despair.  And  it  so  shocked  me 
that  I  immediately  blew  out  the  match. 

I  could  not  think  of  anything  to  say.  I  could 
not  imagine  what  was  the  matter.  It  was  not  like 
a  boy's  grief.  It  was  widowed — tragic.  I  sat 
helplessly  waiting. 

And  suddenly  I  was  overcome  with  a  sickening 

[186] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


depression.  The  sense  of  his  unhappiness  beside 
me,  the  sound  of  the  dance-music  from  behind  us, 
the  sight  of  the  desolate  tennis-courts  vaguely  in 
front  of  us,  the  taste  of  the  cold  cigarette  in  my 
mouth —  Life  has  such  aspects.  They  are  intol- 
erable. The  mind  cannot  endure  them.  It  escapes 
at  once  into  some  future,  some  plan,  some  hope. 
I  began,  desperately:  "I  think  Fd  better  go  into 
town  with  you  to-morrow  and  introduce  you  to 
these  people.  They  want  to  start  rehearsals  right 
away,  and  I'd  like  you  to  get  a  copy  of  your  part 
and  run  over  it  with  you.  A  good  deal  will  depend 
on  the  first  impression  they  get  of  you."  And  so 
forth.  I  talked  about  salary,  contract,  the  prob- 
able success  of  the  play,  his  opportunity  to  make 
a  hit — anything  rosy  that  came  into  my  mind, 
ignoring  the  whole  situation.  He  did  not  speak, 
although  I  paused  several  times  to  wait  for  him. 
When  at  last  I  turned  to  him  directly  and  demanded, 
"Well,  what  do  you  say?"  he  answered,  "It's  too 
late."  And  his  voice  was  not  tearful,  but  quite 
toneless,  out  of  a  tight  throat. 

I  ignored  that,  too.  I  went  ahead  babbling  about 
his  acting,  the  fact  that  he  plainly  had  imagi- 
nation, that  it  was  the  great  gift  in  acting,  that  I 
was  sure  he  would  make  an  immediate  success, 
that  I  had  seen  So-and-so — of  whom  he  reminded 
me — walk  on  to  the  stage  in  New  York,  in  what 
was  almost  his  first  part,  and  get  himself  accepted 
by  the  critics  as  "the  best  actor  in  America  under 

[187] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


twenty-five  years  of  age."  And  if  So-and-so  could 
do  it — 

"It  doesn't  matter,"  he  said,  hoarsely,  more  to 
himself  than  to  me.  "It's  too  late  now."  And  he 
began  to  sob. 

I  could  not  ignore  the  sobs.  I  took  him  by 
the  shoulder.  "Look  here,"  I  said.  "Pull  your- 
self together.  This  is  all  nonsense.  If  you  get 
all  torn  to  pieces  this  way,  you'll  be  good  for 
nothing  to-morrow.  I  don't  know  what  you 
imagine 's  happened  to  you,  but  it  probably  isn't 
half  so  bad  as  you  think.  If  you  make  a  ten- 
strike  in  a  part,  it  '11  change  everything.  Don't 
be  a  fool." 

He  broke  down  completely,  collapsing  in  a  huddle 
when  I  shook  him,  sobbing  with  a  frightful  laboring 
effort  to  get  his  breath,  and  gasping  out  that  she 
was  going,  that  she  was  to  be  married,  that  it  was 
too  late.  I  threw  away  my  cigarette.  I  put  my 
arms  around  his  shoulders  and  pulled  him  over  to 
me.  He  fell  across  me,  his  face  in  his  hands,  and 
lay  there  crying  like  a  child.  I  gave  him  my  hand- 
kerchief when  I  felt  his  tears  soaking  through  my 
thin  summer  trousers.  I  didn't  know  what  in  the 
world  to  do  with  him. 

"If  I  knew  what  was  the  matter,"  I  said,  "I 
might  be  able  to  help  you."  It  struck  me  that  he 
was  crying  as  if  he  had  lost  something  more  than 
a  sweetheart.  "If  it's  Flora  Furness — I  don't 
think  she's  turned  against  you.  She  told  me  to 

[188] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


take  you  home  and  to —  Well,  she  asked  me  to  be 
kind  to  you." 

He  sat  up  at  once,  frantically  wiping  his  eyes. 
"Where  is  she?  Where  is  she?'* 

"No."  I  held  him  by  the  arm.  "You  can't  go 
and  make  a  scene  with  her.  You  stay  where  you 
are  till  you've  pulled  yourself  together.  Besides, 
she's  gone  home  with  her  people." 

With  that  he  began  to  curse  her  family  like  a 
truck-driver,  even  while  he  mopped  away  his  boy's 
tears,  abusing  her  mother  in  language  that  was 
beyond  belief — delirious  indecencies — the  sort  of 
language  that  you  hear  from  a  patient  in  a  surgical 
ward  coming  out  from  under  ether.  I  put  my  hand 
over  his  mouth,  afraid  that  some  one  might  hear 
him.  "Shut  up,"  I  threatened,  "or  I'll  throttle 
you." 

He  struggled  with  me  a  moment,  trying  to  bite 
my  hand,  and  then  he  collapsed  again  into  hysterics. 
I  scolded  him  in  an  attempt  to  get  some  backbone 
into  him  that  way.  "You  young  cad — calling  decent 
people  names  like  that!  What  Ve  you  to  do  with 
a  girl  like  her,  anyway?  Or  any  girl?  You  don't 
earn  your  salt — never  did — never  even  tried  to! 
If  she's  going  to  marry,  she'll  marry  a  better  man 
than  you — no  matter  who  he  is.  I  don't  see  how 
she  ever  came  to  look  at  you.  Or  how  you  ever 
had  the — the  effrontery  to  speak  to  her — to  sup- 
pose that — that  she — " 

He  had  come  back  to  himself  with  a  sort  of  shud- 

[189] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


der.  "I  know,"  he  said,  abjectly.  "I'm  sorry.  I 
— can't  help  it."  He  choked  again  with  tears. 
"You — you,"  he  gulped,  "you  don't  understand." 

"No,"  I  said.  "I'll  be  hanged  if  I  do.  How 
long  has  this  been  going  on?" 

"Always,"  he  wept.  "Always.  Ever  since  I 
can  remember." 

"What?  Why,  you're  crazy!  Here  in  Center- 
brook!" 

"Yes.  Nobody  knew.  Not  even  her  family — 
or  mine." 

And  then  the  whole  story  began  to  come  out 
pell-mell,  every  which  way,  wrong  end  first,  the 
middle  nowhere,  and  all  confused  with  mixed  emo- 
tions, tears  and  young  despair  and  disorderly  out- 
bursts of  vituperation  against  himself,  Center- 
brook,  his  ill  luck,  her  family,  and  everything  and 
everybody  but  the  girl  herself.  For  a  long  time 
I  could  not  believe  him.  Then,  when  I  believed 
I  could  not  understand,  for  much  of  it  he  did  not 
understand  himself  and  could  not  make  credible. 
But  what  a  situation!  With  a  little  of  the  pathos 
of  actuality  taken  out  and  its  place  occupied  by 
romantic  motive  and  symphonic  "bunk,"  what  a 
situation  for  a  fictionist!  Well! 

7 

They  had  met  years  before,  as  children,  in  cir- 
cumstances that  were  just  absurd.  He  had  been 
chopping  kindling  in  the  woodshed  with  his  pockets 

[190] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


frill  of  bake-shop  cookies.  The  Furnesses  had, 
that  day,  moved  into  their  half  of  the  house;  it 
had  been  for  some  time  vacant,  and  a  missing  board 
had  not  yet  been  replaced  in  the  fence  that  made 
the  rear  wall  of  the  woodshed.  Con,  straightening 
up  from  the  kindling  in  order  to  cram  a  cooky  into 
his  mouth,  saw  her  watching  him  through  this  hole 
in  the  fence  with  an  expression  of  hungry  envy. 
He  grinned  and  held  out  a  cooky  to  her.  She 
studied  him  between  shyness  and  temptation. 
("They  never  had  enough  to  eat  in  the  •  house," 
he  explained,  "but  they  were  so  proud  you'd  never 
guess  it.").  He  went  over  to  the  opening  and  said: 
"  Go  on.  Take  one.  They're  good.  My  father 
makes  them.  We  own  the  bakery.  Go  on.  I 
got  lots." 

She  took  it  and  said,  "Thank  you,"  polite,  but 
embarrassed. 

He  introduced  himself.    "What's  your  name?" 

Instead  of  replying  she  said,  unexpectedly, 
"Mother  '11  not  let  me  play  with  you." 

"Why  won't  she?" 

"She  doesn't  let  me  play  with  any  one." 

"All  right,"  he  said.  "Then  I  won't  ask  her  to. 
Have  another." 

He  gave  her  a  handful.  She  was  more  at  her 
ease,  having  confessed  that  she  could  not  play  with 
him.  She  nibbled  the  cakes  greedily,  looking  at 
him  over  them.  "My  name's  Flora,"  she  confided. 

That    was    their   beginning.       "She   wasn't   so 

[1911 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


pretty,"  he  said,  "but  she  wasn't  like  any  girl  I'd 
ever  met  before.  She  was  so  quiet.  She'd  just  stand 
and  watch  you,  and  listen  and  look — look  friendly, 
and  never  say  a  word.  I  was  dead  nuts  about  her 
in  no  time.  I  used  to  take  all  sorts  of  things  in 
my  pocket  for  her,  and  she'd  slip  out  and  get  them 
when  she  heard  me  chopping  wood.  I  used  to  make 
all  the  noise  I  could  on  purpose,  and  bang  on  the 
side  of  the  woodshed  when  she  didn't  come. 

"I  don't  know  how  she  let  me  know — I  guess 
she  told  me  straight  out — that  she  couldn't  speak 
to  me  if  she  saw  me  on  the  street.  I  didn't  care, 
but  I  pretended  I  was  sore.  I  had  some  Scotch 
shortcake  for  her,  but  I  said  I  wouldn't  give  it  to 
her  unless  she  let  me  kiss  her.  She  said  she  wouldn't 
do  it  for  the  shortcake,  but  she'd  do  it  because  she 
couldn't  speak  to  me  on  the  street.  It  was  the — 
the  first  time  I  kissed  her."  And  then  he  began  to 
sob  again. 

He  must  have  been  about  eight  years  old  at  the 
time,  and  she  ten.  Her  father  had  come  to  New 
York  for  an  English  publishing-house.  He  was  an 
Oxford  man  and  a  younger  son;  he  had  not  yet  de- 
veloped his  destructive  weakness  for  brandy  and 
soda,  and,  although  his  income  must  have  been 
beggarly,  the  family  kept  up  appearances.  She 
did  not  go  to  school;  she  was  taught  at  home  by 
her  mother.  And  she  was  not  allowed  to  associate 
with  the  neighborhood  children  because  their  ac- 
cents were  bad.  There  was,  in  fact,  no  accent  in 

[192] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


Centerbrook  that  her  mother  considered  it  safe 
for  her  to  hear  too  often.  Her  brother,  Howard 
Hartley,  was  sent  to  a  boys'  boarding-school  up 
the  Hudson,  after  the  English  fashion.  Mrs.  Fur- 
ness  was  secretly  giving  piano  lessons  in  a  girls' 
school  in  Plainfield.  And  Flora  was  left  alone  in 
the  empty  house  every  afternoon. 

Con  could  not  recall  how  the  meetings  in  the 
woodshed  were  discovered,  but  he  remembered 
clearly  enough  that  he  found  the  missing  board 
replaced  one  day,  and  no  one  answered  his  indus- 
trious uproar  among  the  kindlings.  He  was  not 
outwitted.  He  had  loosened  that  board  himself 
in  order  to  get  into  the  Voss  back  yard  before  the 
Furnesses  occupied  it,  and  he  had  another  way  of 
entering;  he  had  clambered  out  a  dormer-window 
on  to  the  roof  and  forced  an  entrance  through  a 
corresponding  window  on  the  Voss  side  of  the 
bouse.  And  more  than  that.  Miss  Voss's  sound- 
proof walls  did  not  extend  to  the  top  story.  There 
was  a  door  from  the  Gorman  attic  into  the  Voss 
attic.  It  was  bolted  on  both  sides,  but,  having 
entered  the  Voss  attic  through  the  window,  Con 
had  withdrawn  all  the  bolts.  He  had  gone  down 
through  the  house  and  unlocked  the  cellar  door. 
And  with  a  picked  following  of  young  burglars 
he  had  made  the  vacant  house  the  resort  of  a  gang 
of  imaginary  desperadoes  of  which  he  was  captain. 

The  day  that  he  found  the  woodshed  repaired 
he  went  at  once  to  tbe  attic,  took  off  his  shoes  and 

[1931 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


stockings,  and  crawled  across  the  roof  again  into 
the  Furness  top  story.  He  unlocked  the  attic  door 
to  open  a  quick  retreat  for  himself — according  to 
the  best  traditions  of  the  criminal  professions — 
and  started  tiptoeing  down-stairs  in  search  of  the 
imprisoned  princess.  There  was  not  a  sound  any- 
where. He  reached  the  ground  floor  before  he 
heard  so  much  as  a  cough.  There,  through  the 
hinge-crack  of  an  open  door,  he  saw  her  sitting  in 
the  parlor,  reading  a  book.  He  made  sure  that  there 
was  no  one  else  in  the  room  before  he  put  his  head 
in  and  whispered,  "Have  a  gingersnap?"  She 
dropped  her  book  and  cried,  "Con!"  And  she 
made  so  much  noise  about  it  that  he  knew  she  was 
alone  in  the  house. 

8 

That  began  the  second  stage  of  their  affair. 
They  met  in  the  attic  thereafter,  and  talked  and 
read  and  played  together  while  her  mother  was 
away.  It  was  easy  enough  for  the  girl;  there  was 
no  one  to  spy  on  her  so  long  as  she  remained  in- 
doors. But  Con  had  to  practise  all  sorts  of  strata- 
gems and  deceptions  in  order  to  escape  from  his 
small  brothers  and  his  boy  friends,  and  at  first 
he  did  not  spend  much  time  with  her;  he  would 
just  run  up  to  see  her  for  a  few  minutes  after  school 
was  out  and  take  her  some  cakes.  When  the  novelty 
wore  off,  it  was  rather  a  deprivation  for  him  to  be 
shut  up  on  a  holiday  afternoon  with  her,  over  a 

[194] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


book  or  a  game.  If  he  had  been  another  sort  of  boy 
he  might  have  tired  of  it.  But  he  was  naturally 
gentle  and  affectionate  and  "sorry  for  the  kid" 
(as  he  expressed  it  to  me)  and  sufficiently  out  of 
tune  with  his  surroundings  to  enjoy  his  escape 
into  a  hidden  friendship  with  a  girl  like  Flora 
Furness,  and  he  was  not  proud  enough  to  resent 
the  fact  that  she  could  not  know  him  publicly. 
He  Jiad  in  him  a  Celtic  strain  of  poetry  and  imagi- 
nation that  kept  him  as  secretive  about  her  as  if 
she  were  one  of  those  hi  visible  playmates  that 
solitary  children  invent.  She  never  asked  him  to 
come.  She  never  reproached  him  if  he  were  late 
or  hurried.  But  she  was  always  waiting  for  him, 
and  she  glowed  with  a  touching  pleasure,  repressed, 
but  flatteringly  sincere,  when  he  arrived;  and  she 
played  his  make-believe  games  with  him,  fascinated 
by  an  inventiveness  that  was  beyond  her.  She  was 
probably  rather  stupid  as  a  child  in  everything  but 
the  depth  of  her  feeling. 

Apparently  he  did  not  realize  how  far  matters 
had  gone  with  him  until  she  was  sent  away  to  a 
girls'  school  where  she  could  not  receive  letters  or 
write  to  him  without  it  being  known.  He  mooned 
arouhd  in  a  state  of  desperate  loneliness  for  a  long 
time  before  he  returned  to  his  proper  associates. 
It  was  during  this  absence  of  hers  that  he  took  the 
Gorman  attic  room  as  his  bedroom  and  study, 
with  some  boyish  idea  of  being  nearer  the  memory 
of  her.  He  put  the  high  head  of  his  bed  against 

[195] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


the  connecting  door  to  conceal  it,  but  sometimes, 
when  he  had  locked  himself  in,  he  moved  the  bed 
aside  and  went  into  the  other  room  and  pretended 
that  she  was  there  with  him. 

Then  she  returned  for  the  holidays  and  the  thing 
began  to  be  serious.  She  had  been  unhappy  at 
the  school.  The  other  girls  were  all  daughters  of 
the  well-to-do;  she  had  put  on  the  pride  of  poverty 
in  her  association  with  them,  and  they  had  retali- 
ated as  Centerbrook  would  have  retaliated  if  it 
had  had  the  opportunity.  She  had  made  no  friends. 
She  could  not  appeal  for  sympathy  to  her  mother, 
whose  ideal  of  character  was  not  exactly  sympa- 
thetic. And  it  was  impossible  to  appeal  to  her 
father;  her  mother  had  always  been  between  them 
in  the  family  administration.  So  she  poured  it  all 
out  to  Con.  He  took  it  greedily  and  consoled  her 
with  the  whispers  of  adolescent  love.  They  began 
meeting  at  night,  after  the  others  of  the  household 
were  in  bed.  She  came  to  his  room. 

9 

Well,  as  I  say,  the  middle  of  their  story  was 
missing  from  his  account  of  it.  The  end  of  it  came 
first;  and  it  only  ran  back  as  far  as  the  time  when 
he  left  school  to  go  to  work.  She  tried  to  persuade 
him  to  continue  his  studies,  but  he  was  too  im- 
patient; he  was  eager  to  earn  money,  to  make 
himself  rich,  so  that  they  might  be  married  the 
sooner.  That  was  why  he  gave  up  driving  the 

[196] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


bakery  wagon;  there  were  no  riches  in  sight  along 
that  route;  and  while  he  traveled  it  he  had  to  de- 
liver bread  to  her  back  door  and  be  treated  as  a 
hired  man  by  her  mother.  And  that  was  why  he 
left  every  other  occupation  that  he  tried  in  Center- 
brook.  He  lasted  longest  at  the  soda-fountain, 
because  the  Furnesses  had  not  the  American  weak- 
nesses for  cold  drinks  and  proprietary  medicines. 
The  apparent  cheerfulness  of  his  irresponsibility 
was  a  humorous  Irish  mask  for  his  distaste  for  com- 
mercial drudgery  and  the  growing  unhappiness  of 
his  divided  life.  He  flung  out  impatiently  against 
a  situation  which  only  the  most  deadly  application 
of  industry  could  have  cured. 

When  he  tried  working  in  New  York  he  was 
away  from  her  all  day;  she  had  now  refused  to 
meet  him  at  night  after  the  others  were  asleep, 
and  he  could  not  endure  the  deprivation  of  not 
seeing  her.  She  must  have  discovered,  by  this 
time,  that  then*  love-affair  was  becoming  a  guilty 
madness.  While  he  was  with  her  he  had  all  sorts 
of  plans,  the  most  impossible  hopes,  the  wildest 
dreams,  but — away  from  her — he  could  not  fulfil 
them.  She  was  like  a  drug  that  left  him  enervated 
instead  of  a  stimulant  to  spur  him  on. 

For  a  year  at  least  a  silent  struggle  had  gone 
on  between  them;  and  then,  apparently,  she  gave 
it  up.  He  began  drifting  aimlessly,  and  she  did 
not  reproach  him.  He  took  it  for  granted  that  she 
was  satisfied  to  wait  for  the  realization  of  his  vague 

[197] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


ambition  to  be  a  singer — he  was  the  barytone  soloist 
in  the  Choral  Club — to  "break  into"  musical  com- 
edy, to  take  to  the  concert  stage.  She  had  become 
patiently  melancholy,  but  he  attributed  that  to 
the  war.  Her  mother's  was  a  military  family,  and 
five  of  her  relatives  had  been  killed  at  the  front. 
The  letters  from  home  were  full  of  tragedy  and  dis- 
couragement. She  tried  to  talk  to  him  about  it, 
but  he  knew  very  little  about  the  war  and  cared 
less.  His  father  was  an  irreconcilable  hater  of  the 
Sassenach,  rejoicing  in  the  British  disasters;  and 
Con  felt  himself  superior  to  both  sides  in  his  neu- 
tral indifference. 

Now  she  had  just  returned  from  a  visit  to  friends 
in  New  York,  and  she  had  returned  most  affec- 
tionate, but  most  depressed.  Her  brother,  Howard 
Hartley,  was  going  to  England  to  enlist.  She  had 
even  hinted  that  there  was  talk  of  the  whole  family 
accompanying  him.  But  she  had  said  nothing  about 
Lieutenant  Williamson,  and  it  was  only  accident- 
ally that  Con  overheard  some  one  at  the  Country 
Club  speaking  of  the  Englishman  as  her  fiance". 
That  had  happened  on  the  club-house  veranda,  just 
a  few  minutes  before  I  spoke  to  him.  It  was  the 
cause  of  his  excessive  emotion  at  my  offer  of  as- 
sistance. It  was  the  reason  why  he  had  tried  to  get 
a  dance  with  her,  and  waylaid  her  when  he  saw 
me  with  her,  and  followed  us  to  demand  of  her, 
"Are  you  going  to  marry  him?" 

She  had  refused  to  say  that  she  was  not.     She 

[198] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


had  admitted  that  she  was  probably  going  to  Eng- 
land with  Howard  and  her  parents.  "We're  needed. 
We're  all  needed,"  she  kept  saying.  "And  what's 
the  use  of  my  staying  here?  I'm  only  ruining  your 
life." 

"And  she's  not!"  Con  cried.  "She's  not!  She 
can't  leave  me  now — after  what  there's  been  be- 
tween us.  I'll  go  crazy.  I'll  kill  myself.  It's 
all  I've  had  to  live  for  in  this —  If  she's  needed 
over  there —  Needed!  I  know.  I  know.  It's 
her  mother.  She's—  She's  got  her  all  doped  up 
with  this  English  stuff.  She  always  did  it.  She's 
kept  her  away  from  everybody  and  everything. 
If  it  hadn't  been  for  me  she'd  've  gone  crazy,  shut 
up  that  way,  with  no  one  even  to  talk  to!  She 
doesn't  understand.  She  believes  what  her  mother 
tells  her.  She's  always  doing  things  because  her 
mother —  She  should  've —  When  I  wanted  her 
to —  When  I  had  a  job  in  New  York  in  that  big 
clothing-store  I  wanted  her  to  beat  it  and  get  mar- 
ried, and  she  wouldn't.  She  said  it  would  be  'too 
terrible — for  mother.'  That  old  snoot!  I'd  like 
to  know —  I  don't  see  what  hold  they've  got  over 
her.  I  can't  make  her —  Half  the  time  I  can't 
even  tell  what  she's  thinking  about  any  more.  She 
just  sat  here  to-night  and  shivered  till  I  could  hear 
her  teeth  chatter  and  said,  'No.  No.  I'm  ruining 
your  life!'  And  she's  not!  She's  not!  Oh —  Oh 
— if  I  lose  her —  She  can't!  I  can't  let  her!  She's 
got  to  wait !  I'm  only  nineteen.  I'll  find  some  way. 

14  [199] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


I'll   do   anything!     I   don't   care,  as   long  as  she 
doesn't  go  and —    O  my  God,  I'll  go  crazy!" 

And  I  was  afraid  that  he  might.  I  never  saw  any- 
thing like  it.  He  would  talk  himself  into  compara- 
tive exhaustion,  and  then  the  thought  that  he  was 
going  to  lose  her  would  strike  him  like  a  physical 
pang,  and  he  would  bury  his  face  in  his  hands  and 
cry  out  as  if  he  were  contorted  with  actual  pain. 
And  then  he  would  begin  to  rave  again.  He  had 
an  amazing  capacity  for  suffering.  He  wore  me 
out  with  it.  I  would  certainly  have  given  him  an 
opiate  if  I  had  had  one  with  me.  For  a  long  time 
I  could  think  of  nothing  else  to  do. 

10 

I  was  convinced  that  she  had  made  up  her  mind 
to  break  with  him.  It  was  the  only  course  open  to 
her.  He  could  not  marry  her;  he  could  not  marry 
any  one;  and  there  was  no  prospect  that  he  would 
ever  be  in  a  position  to  marry  a  girl  of  her  tradi- 
tions. She  could  not  introduce  him  to  her  family 
and  its  conventions,  even  as  a  friend;  it  would  have 
been  torture  for  both  him  and  her.  She  was  return- 
ing to  her  own  people.  There  was  nothing  for  him 
to  do  but  to  return  to  his.  That  was  obvious. 

But  it  was  equally  obvious  that  if  he  realized 
what  she  was  doing  he  would  fight  it  in  a  scandalous 
frenzy.  He  would  expose  her  to  everybody  as  he 
had  already  exposed  her  to  me.  He  was  beyond  the 
reach  of  persuasion,  caution,  reason  of  any  kind. 

[200] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


He  talked  incoherently  of  going  to  her  family  and 
confronting  her  mother  and  "bawling  them  out." 
It  was  just  frantic  nonsense,  but  he  seemed  capable 
of  doing  it.  And  since,  by  her  appeal,  she  had  made 
me  responsible  for  him,  I  could  not  simply  walk 
away  and  leave  him  to  run  amuck. 

I  began  to  persuade  him  that  his  situation  had 
been  entirely  changed  by  the  fact  that  I  had  a  part 
for  him  in  a  play.  I  assured  him  that  he  was  an 
actor,  with  a  career  before  him.  If  he  could  con- 
vince her  of  that — or  if  he  could  persuade  her  to 
wait  a  month  while  he  proved  it — even  if  she  went 
to  England  she  might  be  willing  to  wait  for  him. 
"Show  her,"  I  argued.  "That's  what  you  have  to 
do — show  her.  Make  good.  Get  her  to  give  you 
time.  She'll  do  it,  I'm  sure.  Even  if  she  goes  to 
England  she'll  wait,  if  she  sees  any  hope.  She's 
that  sort  of  girl.  Show  her  that  you  have  the  back- 
bone and  she'll  stand  by  you.  Sure." 

And  I  intended  to  find  some  way  of  reaching  her 
and  saying:  "You  can't  go  off  like  this.  He'll  do 
something  mad.  I  can't  hold  him.  Nobody  can — 
except  you.  If  you  have  to  go  to  England,  wait 
till  you  get  there  before  you  break  with  him. 
Give  him  some  hope — and  take  it  away  from 
him  gradually  if  you  must.  But,  meanwhile, 
help  me,  some  way.  You'll  have  to.  He's  in  a 
frightful  state." 

I  persuaded  him  easily  enough.  He  was  ready 
to  clutch  at  anything.  But  I  persuaded  him  too 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


well.  I  persuaded  him  so  well  that  he  insisted  only 
7  could  persuade  her. 

"She  won't  believe  me,"  he  confessed,  pitifully. 
"I've  had  too  many  plans  that  never  came  to  any- 
thing. But  if  you  told  her  that  I  can  act  —  that 
you've  got  this  part  for  me  —  that  we'll  go  and  land 
it  to-morrow  morning  —  she'll  believe  you.  Yes,  she 
will.  'Phone  her.  'Phone  her.  Come  on  and  tele- 
phone her." 

"I'll  do  it,"  I  said,  "if  you'll  promise  to  go  home, 
and  stay  there,  and  keep  quiet,  and  get  ready  to 
come  to  town  with  me  to-morrow  morning." 

"All  right.  All  right."  He  grabbed  my  arm. 
"  Come  on.  You  can  'phone  her  from  the  drug- 
store. Hurry  up.  We'll  be  too  late.  They  lock 


At  least  he  was  no  longer  in  hysterics;  there  was 
that  much  gained.  And  he  had  given  up  his  idea 
of  bursting  in  on  her  family  and  demanding  her  out 
of  hand.  But  in  some  unconscious  need  of  physical 
action  to  relieve  his  impatience  he  tried  to  start 
me  running  to  the  drug-store  instead  of  taking 
my  car.  "Keep  quiet,  you  idiot!"  I  said.  "This 
has  to  be  done  carefully.  Get  in  the  back  seat 
there  and  keep  quiet.  I  have  to  think  of  what 
to  say  to  her." 

I  might  as  well  have  tried  to  think  in  a  Bellevue 
ambulance,  with  a  patient  on  the  way  to  the 
psychopathic  ward.  He  had  gone  from  a  frenzy  of 
despair  to  an  insane  height  of  voluble  hope.  Cer- 

[202] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


tainly  he  would  make  a  great  actor  if  temperament 
could  do  it. 

I  left  him  in  the  car  when  I  got  out  at  the  drug- 
gist's to  telephone.  And  I  had  a  moment  to  collect 
my  thoughts  while  her  brother — who  answered  the 
'phone — went  to  call  her.  I  began  guardedly  to 
explain  to  her  that  I  needed  help,  mentioning  no 
names;  that  I  had  succeeded  in  persuading  him  to 
go  home,  but  he  insisted  that  I  must  see  her;  that 
I  had  something  to  propose — 

She  cut  me  short  with,  "Tell  him  I'll  come." 

I  did  not  understand.  "Where?"  I  asked. 
"When?" 

She  repeated,  "Tell  him  I'll  come."  And  she 
hung  up. 

He  understood. 

"Come  on.  Come  on,"  he  cried.  "Hurry  up. 
My  room.  It's  my  room." 

11 

I  was  glad  that  Centerbrook  went  to  bed  at  ten. 
He  hung  over  me,  from  the  back  seat,  urging  me 
on,  like  the  heroine  of  a  movie  race  between  a 
touring-car  and  sudden  death.  And  when  he  had 
hurried  me,  stumbling  through  the  dark  halls  and 
up  the  creaking  staircases  of  the  sleeping  Gorman 
family,  and  pushed  me  into  his  attic  room  and 
locked  the  door  behind  us  and  switched  on  the  light, 
he  stood,  with  his  eyes  on  the  faded  chintz  curtains 
of  a  clothes-closet,  panting  with  all  the  impatient 

[203] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


Demotions  of  a  screen  star  with  the  chest  heaves. 
It  seemed  to  me  that  life  had  become  amazingly 
melodramatic. 

He  began  to  pace  up  and  down  the  room  under 
the  sloping  ceiling,  talking  in  low,  eager,  distracted 
tones,  throwing  out  abrupt  and  meaningless  gest- 
ures at  me.  He  was  vitalized  with  emotion  to  a 
degree  that  made  him  feverishly  demonstrative, 
but  inexpressive.  He  bewildered  me.  He  filled 
the  little  dormer-windowed  room  with  a  noiseless 
clamor  of  incoherent  whispers  and  incommunicable 
dumb  show  and  jumpy  shadows.  I  sat  down  on 
the  side  of  the  bed  and  felt  dizzy. 

Suddenly  he  stopped.  He  stood  waiting  in  a 
breathy  silence.  The  chintz  curtains  parted  before 
her,  over  an  open  door.  And  with  her  entrance 
our  movie  melodrama  became,  at  once,  the  tragedy 
of  beauty  and  dignity  and  poignant  repression. 

She  was  draped  in  some  sort  of  flowing  dressing- 
gown  that  made  her  appear  matronly  and  classical. 
Her  hair  had  been  hastily  gathered  up  in  a  coiled 
disorder  high  on  her  head.  She  came  in  from  the 
darkness  to  our  light  noiselessly,  and  found  him 
with  a  slow,  set  look  that  pitied  him  and  suffered 
for  him  and  stood  firm.  It  was  a  look  of  irrevocable 
judgment  and  unmerciful  compassion;  and  it  made 
her  most  movingly  beautiful  to  see. 

Con  cried  out  at  once  and  rushed  to  her  and 
took  her  in  his  arms.  I  went  to  blink  out  a  window. 

I  began  to  realize  the  seriousness  of  the  situation 

[204] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


in  which  I  had  undertaken  to  help.  She  had  more 
character  than  I  had  supposed.  She  was  more 
mature.  She  was  not  sparing  herself,  and  I  had  to 
persuade  her  to  spare  him.  I  did  not  believe  that 
I  could  do  it.  But  when  she  spoke  to  me  and  I 
turned  she  was  sitting  in  an  old  arm-chair,  bending 
over  Con,  who  was  kneeling  on  the  floor  at  her  feet, 
his  face  buried  in  her  knees  childishly;  and  she  was 
consoling  him,  like  a  widowed  mother,  with  silent 
caresses,  herself  in  tears.  If  she  had  that  maternal 
love  for  him — 

I  began  to  tell  her  about  the  part  that  I  had  for 
him,  talking  for  his  benefit  and  making  conspiring 
signs  to  her.  It  is  an  amazing  thing  to  look  back 
on;  I  did  not  predict  half  the  success  that  he  has 
met  with,  and  yet  neither  of  us  believed  a  word  I 
said.  He  alone  was  convinced  by  me.  He  looked 
up  at  her  while  she  listened,  and  she  pretended  to 
be  interested  and  impressed.  "All  he  needs,"  I 
said,  "is  a  little  time — a  month,  say — to  show  you.'* 
("Just  a  month,"  he  pleaded.  "Just  a  month.") 
"Don't  do  anything  final — even  if  you  have  to  go 
to  England.  Wait.  Give  him  a  chance."  ("  I'll 
make  good.  I  will.  I  promise.")  "He  has  real 
possibilities — real  imagination — a  real  gift  for  the 
stage."  And  so  on. 

She  kept  saying,  in  reply  to  him,  "Yes,  yes. 
I'm  sure  you  will,"  trying  to  smile,  and  patting  at 
him  blindly.  "Yes,  yes.  I  know." 

In  the  midst  of  it  she  turned  to  me — in  response 

[205] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


to  something  in  my  manner  of  which  I  was  unaware 
— and  said,  jealously:  "You  mustn't  blame  him. 
He's  been  so  good  to  me.  He's — he's  such  a  dear. 
It  has  all  been  more  my  fault  than  his.  I  wasn't 
brave  enough.  I'm  not  now.  We  were  just — just 
children — innocent.  We  didn't  understand.  And 
we  were — so  happy." 

"Oh,  Flora!"  he  sobbed.  They  clung  together 
like  the  babes  in  the  woods.  I  felt  like  the  cruel 
uncle. 

I  went  back  to  the  window.  The  lights  of  my  car 
were  burning  in  the  street  below.  When  there  was 
a  pause  in  their  pitiful  endearments  I  said,  "We 
want  to  be  in  town  early  to-morrow  morning." 
I  couldn't  stand  any  more  of  it.  "You  come  along 
with  me,  Con,  and  we'll  run  in  to-night,  in  the 
machine,  sleep  in  my  room  there,  and  get  hold  of 
Bidey  before  any  one  else  is  given  the  part.  I 
can  'phone  up  to  the  house  and  say  I've  been  called 
in  to  New  York  unexpectedly.  It  often  happens." 
I  made  a  sign  to  her.  It  was  as  if  we  both  knew 
that  she  was  dying  and  we  were  planning  to  get 
him  away  in  ignorance  of  it.  She  took  it  with  just 
that  face. 

"Yes,  yes,"  she  said.  "Go  on,  Con  dear.  Does 
he  need  to  take  his  things?  Let  me  pack  them." 

"And  I'll  run  along,  and  telephone,  and  be  back 
in  ten  minutes."  I  was  glad  of  the  chance  to  escape. 
"I'll  toot  for  you." 

She  held  out  her  hand.     "Good-by,"  she  said, 

[206] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


simply.  "Thank  you."  But  the  look  and  the  clasp 
of  the  hand  that  went  with  it  were  secretly  in  the 
manner  of  a  death-bed  farewell. 

Not  merely  haste  and  darkness  made  me  stumble 
going  down  the  stairs. 

12 

I  took  as  long  as  I  could  at  the  telephone,  and 
had  the  car  filled  at  the  garage,  and  dawdled  return- 
ing. Even  so  I  had  to  wait  ten  minutes  before  the 
light  in  his  room  went  out  and  I  knew  that  they 
had  parted. 

I  could  imagine  what  the  parting  had  been  when 
I  saw  him  stagger  down  the  steps  with  his  suit- 
case. And  I  was  sorry  enough  for  him.  But  I  had 
to  pretend  to  be  optimistic  or  betray  her  confidence. 
"Now,  boy,"  I  said,  "get  in,  back  there,  and  make 
up  your  mind  to  leave  this  trouble  behind  you  till 
you've  landed  the  part  and  landed  it  big."  He 
dropped  the  bag  and  sank  into  the  seat,  exhausted. 
"There's  room  to  lie  down  on  the  floor,  if  you  want 
to  sleep.  You  can  put  back  that  foot-rail."  He 
muttered  something  feebly  and  shook  his  head.  I 
threw  in  the  gas.  And  Conrad  Norman  started 
toward  his  unbelievable  success. 

He  did  not  arrive  in  my  care. 

I  got  him  the  part  in  the  play  with  no  effort 
whatever.  He  seemed  ideal  for  it.  He  began  to 
rehearse.  And  after  watching  him  for  a  few  morn- 

[207] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


ings  I  left  him  to  his  fate.  It  was  evident  that  he 
lacked  training.  Beside  the  cultivated  "readings" 
of  the  professionals  in  the  cast  he  sounded  amateur, 
pale-voiced.  His  tones  had  no  theatrical  make-up 
on  them.  They  did  not  carry  his  points.  At  the 
best  it  would  take  him  three  or  four  years  to  acquire 
the  experience  and  authority  needed  to  put  him 
over  with  an  audience.  And  even  then  would 
Flora  Furness  marry  him? 

How  could  she?  All  the  years  that  we  had  been 
laughing  at  the  Furnesses  in  Centerbrook  Mrs. 
Furness  had  been  instinctively  molding  her  son 
and  her  daughter  to  a  career  that  was  now  begin- 
ning. Like  a  queen  in  exile,  she  had  kept  her  chil- 
dren reminded  of  their  royalty,  stanch  to  their  class. 
She  had  preserved  in  them  the  accents,  the  man- 
ners, the  conventions,  the  ideals  of  the  governing 
English.  Flora  could  no  more  escape  from  them — 
to  marry  Gorman — than  if  she  were  a  crown  prin- 
cess whose  whole  family  depended  upon  her  to 
succeed  to  a  throne.  Her  very  beauty  made  escape 
impossible.  I  could  foresee  that  much. 

I  did  not  foresee  Con's  complete  failure  at  re- 
hearsals. 

For  a  week  everything  went  fairly  well.  Appar- 
ently he  tried  to  work  and  forget  her.  He  tried  to 
keep  her  out  of  his  thoughts  and  learn  his  lines. 
And  I  judge  that  what  he  succeeded  in  doing  was 
this:  by  a  very  common  trick  of  the  mind  he  in- 
hibited not  his  memory  of  her,  but  his  memory  for 

[208] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


liis  role.  When  every  one  else  in  the  cast  was  letter 
perfect  he  was  still  stumbling  and  uncertain.  He 
began  to  lose  his  self-confidence.  He  could  not 
"read"  a  single  line  correctly,  because  he  was  try- 
ing to  recall  it,  not  trying  to  mean  it.  No  one 
understood  what  was  the  matter  with  him.  They 
thought  that  he  was  simply  stupid.  When  they 
found  him  crying  in  the  wings  they  accepted  it  as 
his  despairing  recognition  of  his  own  failure.  (He 
was  crying,  I  learned  afterward,  because  she  had 
sailed  from  Boston  that  morning.)  The  stage 
director  "let  him  out,"  as  they  say.  I  did  not  hear 
of  it  for  some  days,  and  he  did  not  come  to  me  for 
any  further  help.  He  went  to  Los  Angeles  with  a 
film  company. 

Three  months  later  we  got  the  news  in  Center- 
brook  that  Lieutenant  Williamson  had  succeeded 
to  some  sort  of  title  by  the  death  of  his  two  elder 
brothers  in  France,  and  that  Flora  had  married 
him  in  the  church  at  Bury.  And,  as  far  as  I  was 
concerned,  the  story  was  complete. 

When  I  saw  Conrad  Norman  in  "King  Charles 
the  First"  I  realized  what  fools  we  had  all  been  and 
of  what  a  young  genius  the  spoken  drama  had  been 
deprived.  I  realized,  also,  that  the  disastrous  end- 
ing of  his  affair  with  Flora  Furness  had  been  the 
making  of  him  artistically.  He  had  qualities  of 
repose  and  pathos  that  were  marvelous  in  one  so 
young.  His  salary  was  advertised  as  a  thousand 
dollars  a  week.  At  that  price  he  was  irrevocably 

[209] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


lost  to  the  playwrights.  I  felt  sorry  for  them.  I 
even  felt  sorry  for  Flora  Furness.  As  for  the  Cen- 
terbrookers,  the  joke  was  on  them  both  ways.  The 
daughter  of  the  stuffed-heart  aristocracy  and  poor 
Con  Gorman,  the  ne'er-do-well,  had  both  arrived 
at  their  distinguished  goals  by  following  the  im- 
practical bypaths  which  Centerbrook — in  the  per- 
son of  the  coal-yard  proprietor — had  so  despised. 
Life  has  a  way  of  playing  such  little  jokes  upon  the 
wisdom  of  the  too  practical. 

13 

It  has  also  a  way  of  playing  similar  jokes  upon 
the  wisdom  of  the  too  unromantic. 

I  supposed,  as  I  say,  that  their  story  was  com- 
plete. They  were  separated  by  all  the  waters  of 
the  Atlantic,  to  say  nothing  of  the  even  greater 
distances  of  social  differences  between  them.  When 
we  heard  that  Howard  Hartley,  being  invalided 
home  from  France,  had  married  an  English  heiress 
the  news  made  no  point  with  me.  It  did  not  occur  to 
me  that  the  Furness  family  no  longer  depended  on 
Flora  to  maintain  their  position  in  the  world.  I 
was  equally  blind  when  her  husband's  name  was 
given  among  those  who  died  aboard  the  Queen 
Mary  in  the  Jutland  battle.  I  still  thought  of  Lady 
Flora  Williamson  as  irrevocably  committed  to  the 
aristocratic  life  and  the  war  work  of  the  Woman's 
Auxiliary  Corps,  of  which  she  was  an  active 
patroness. 

[210] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


Even  when  I  received  a  letter  from  her,  asking 
how  Con  was  doing,  I  took  it  merely  as  more  of  her 
"unmerciful  compassion,"  sent  her  an  account  of 
him,  and  inclosed  her  letter  in  an  envelope  to  Con- 
rad Norman  in  care  of  the  Domino  Film  Company. 
She  wrote,  it  seemed  to  me,  in  a  tone  of  war  weari- 
ness; but  that  was  natural.  She  said  something 
about  England  being  changed,  life  there  a  tragedy, 
the  war  a  "dreadful  oppression."  I  did  not  wish  to 
blame  her,  but  I  felt  that  if  she  was  unhappy  she 
had  no  right  to  imply  that  I  was  responsible — by 
writing  to  me  for  sympathy. 

What  I  did  not  understand  was  this:  England 
had  been  to  her  a  home  of  dreams,  a  place  of  refuge 
in  her  mind  from  all  the  realities  of  poverty  and 
Centerbrook.  Her  father  and  mother  talked  of  it 
as  Adam  and  Eve  might  have  recalled  better  days 
in  Eden.  All  her  English  novels  painted  it  in  im- 
aginative colors,  in  "the  light  that  never  was"; 
and  she  went  to  it  as  an  escape  from  life,  from  the 
hopelessness  of  her  affection  for  Con  Gorman  and 
the  sight  of  his  misery.  And  she  found  that  Eng- 
land was  "changed,"  that  life  there  was  full  of  the 
most  terrible  realities  of  death  and  war,  that  she 
had  not  escaped,  that  even  the  unhappiness  of 
Centerbrook  looked  like  comparative  peace  and 
quiet. 

This,  as  I  say,  is  what  I  did  not  understand.  I 
did  not  understand  it  till  she  told  me  of  it  herself, 
not  very  lucidly,  sitting  over  our  coffee-cups  after 

[211] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


dinner  in  a  suite  at  the  Biltmore,  a  week  after  Con 
and  she  had  been  married,  under  such  head-lines 
as  these: 

SCREEN  STAR  WEDS  PEERESS 

CONRAD  NORMAN  SECRETLY  MARRIED  TO  SIR  CUTHBERT 
WILLIAMSON'S  WIDOW 

Conrad  Norman,  popular  star  of  the  Domino  Film  Company, 
and  Lady  Flora  Williamson,  widow  of  Sir  Cuthbert  William- 
son, late  of  the  British  navy  and  who  was  killed  in  the  Jut- 
land battle,  were  married  by  the  Rev.  Simon  G.  Montague,  in  St. 
Agatha's  Episcopal  Church,  upper  Broadway,  last  Tuesday  after- 
noon, it  was  learned  yesterday.  Lady  Williamson  is  the  only — 

I  had  not  been  invited  to  the  wedding.  I  should 
probably  never  have  been  invited  to  the  dinner 
either,  if  I  had  not  happened  to  encounter  Lady 
Flora  under  the  porte-cochere  of  the  Biltmore  after 
their  secret  was  in  all  the  papers.  "We  intended  to 
start  at  once  for  California,"  she  apologized,  "or 
I  should  have  called  you  up.  You  must  have  dinner 
with  us.  Con  will  be  so  glad  to  see  you.'* 

I  suspected  that  Con  would  be  about  as  glad  to 
see  me  as  to  see  the  coal-proprietor  from  Leedy 
Street,  and  my  suspicion  was  accurate.  He  was 
entirely  polite,  at  his  ease,  and  unself -conscious,  but 
he  scarcely  looked  at  me.  He  kept  his  eyes  almost 
constantly  on  his  wife.  He  talked  to  me,  as  it  were, 
through  her.  And  he  gave  me  the  strangest  im- 
pression of  a  complete  withdrawal  of  interest,  not 
only  from  me,  but  from  all  the  outer  world  from 
which  I  came. 

[212] 


CONRAD    NORMAN 


At  first  I  thought  he  averted  his  eyes  from  Center- 
brook,  as  represented  in  my  person,  and  from  his 
past,  of  which  I  reminded  him.  But  he  had  the  same 
air  toward  the  waiters  who  served  him  and  the  food 
that  he  ate.  And  when  she  spoke  of  both  Center- 
brook  and  of  their  days  there  he  had  no  change  of 
face.  He  listened  to  her  and  watched  her,  deeply 
contented — too  contented  to  speak  or  to  smile. 
He  was  obviously  a  happy  man,  in  a  happy  dream, 
making  a  fortune  in  a  world  of  make-believe  as  a 
young  actor  and  seeing  in  her  the  only  reality  that 
interested  him. 

As  for  her,  she  seemed  more  beautiful,  more  dis- 
tinguished, and  yet  more  human  than  ever.  Our 
dinner  was  served  in  the  sitting-room  of  their  suite, 
a  room  of  French  grays  and  gray-greens  that  had 
an  air  of  luxurious  delicacy,  in  which  she  reigned 
like  a  princess  of  Versailles.  The  waiters  looked  to 
her  for  their  directions  and  she  gave  them  without 
consulting  her  husband;  she  knew  exactly  what  he 
liked  and  how  he  liked  it  served.  A  maid  came 
to  her  with  a  telephone  call,  and  she  said,  "Tell 
them  he  is  at  dinner."  A  man-servant  brought  her 
railroad  tickets,  and  she  explained  to  me,  "We  are 
leaving  for  Los  Angeles  to-morrow.*'  They  had 
seats  for  the  opera  that  evening,  and  it  was  she  who 
watched  the  clock  and  ordered  the  taxi. 

I  congratulated  them  on  their  happiness  as  I 
left.  She  said,  "I'm  happier  than  I  ever  deserved 
to  be."  And  she  put  her  arm  through  Con's  and 

[215] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


patted  his  hand,  looking  up  at  him  fondly,  as  if  to 
assure  him  that  he,  at  least,  had  deserved  his  happi- 
ness. 

In  any  case,  he  continues  to  enjoy  it  and  his 
popularity  and  his  income  and  his  whole  colossal 
success.  Charlie  Chaplin  is  now  his  only  rival  in 
the  pubh'c  eye,  and  even  Chaplin  has  to  take  the 
second  place  which  comedy  must  always  accept 
from  tragedy  in  the  republic  of  art. 


\ 


FROM  THE  LIFE 
W.  T. 


W.  T. 


I  DO  not  know  who  he  is.  And  neither  does  old 
Captain  Jim  Johnson,  who  told  me  about  him. 
We  know  only  his  initials.  They  were  tattooed  on 
his  right  forearm  in  blue  ink  and  red — a  blue  anchor 
with  a  twist  of  red  rope  around  the  shank,  and  a 
red  "W"  over  one  fluke  and  a  blue  "X"  over  the 
other.  But  what  we  do  know  is  his  remarkable 
story,  and  it  surely  entitles  him  to  a  place  in  these 
portrait-studies,  for  it  seems  to  me  quite  the  most 
distinguished  true  story  that  I  have  run  across; 
and  if  "W.  T."  is  not  himself  immortally  famous, 
it  is  only  because  he  has  not  met  a  Eugene  Sue  to 
do  him  as  another  "Wandering  Jew,"  or  a  second 
Coleridge  to  make  another  "Ancient  Mariner"  of 
him. 

Moreover,  Captain  Johnson  has  begged  me: 
"Put  somethin'  about  him  in  the  papers,  an*  if 
any  one  comes  across  'm,  tell  'em  to  write  Cap'n 
Jim  Johnson,  Port  Derby,  eh?  I'd  like  to  get  th* 
oF  crocodile  back  here  an'  look  after  'm.  I  don't 
sleep  well  no  more.  Gettin*  old.  An'  I — I  kind  o' 
bother  about  him  at  night.  You  know." 

So,  if  only  to  keep  my  promise  to  the  captain — 

[2171 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


Imagine  an  old  stooped  sailorman  coming  into 
Port  Derby  one  summer  day  in  the  late  'nineties, 
with  brass  rings  in  his  ears  and  dusty  to  the  waist 
with  walking.  Imagine  him  as  bald  as  a  toad — 
not  a  hair  on  his  face,  not  an  eyelash,  not  a  bristle 
— and  his  scalp  as  bare  as  a  dried  mushroom  below 
the  sun-greened  cloth  cap  that  he  wore  on  his  skull- 
top.  Imagine  him  wind-cured,  sea-scalded,  storm- 
toughened,  wrinkling  up  his  forehead  to  open  his 
eyes,  working  his  lips  in  a  toothless  mumble,  shuf- 
fling along  the  road  with  the  dust  puffing  up  under 
his  feet,  and  looking  altogether  like  an  old  tortoise 
that  had  been  driven  out  into  the  glare  of  the  high- 
way in  search  of  a  new  "crawl." 

And  imagine  Port  Derby  a  mere  cluster  of  houses 
at  the  mouth  of  Catfish  Creek,  with  orchards  and 
corn-fields  behind  them,  a  rotting  wharf  at  the 
water's  edge,  some  boats  drawn  up  on  the  sands, 
and  a  number  of  great  pound  nets,  raised  on  poles 
in  a  shore  meadow,  waiting  to  be  mended.  Imagine 
the  little  village  lying  in  a  hollow  so  quiet  and  so 
hidden  that  the  hills  of  the  shore-line  seemed  to 
cuddle  it  in  the  crook  of  an  arm,  with  a  haze  veil- 
ing it  against  the  midday  sun  and  all  Lake  Erie 
glittering  before  it  and  all  Lake  Erie's  little  waves 
rustling  quietly  on  the  beach  shingle. 

Imagine  such  a  weary  old  tramp,  in  the  blazing 
heat  of  the  hill  road,  looking  down  on  such  a  peace- 

[218] 


W.    T. 

ful  refuge — so  cool  and  so  moist — and  you  will 
understand  what  Captain  Johnson  does  not  pro- 
fess to  know,  namely,  why  "th*  oP  crocodile 
happened  in  on  Port  Derby."  As  well  ask  why 
the  alligators  happened  in  on  the  Everglades  of 
Florida. 

The  captain,  sitting  on  the  veranda  of  the  little 
hotel,  saw  him  come  crawling  across  the  wooden 
bridge  of  Catfish  Creek.  "Well,"  he  says,  "I  seen 
at  onct  he  was  a  sailorman.  Rings  in  his  ears,  oP- 
fashioned  sailor  ways.  He  was  the  color  of  a  smoked 
ham  that's  been  hung  too  long.  Kind  o*  dried  up 
an*  drawn  to  the  string.  Bald  as  a  peeled  egg. 
Been  trampin',  I  c'u'd  see  that." 

And  the  captain  greeted  him,  "Well,  mate,  where 
're  you  bound  to?" 


The  man  stopped  and  looked  up  at  him  slowly, 
with  a  brow-puckered  scrutiny,  dazed  and  uncer- 
tain. He  did  not  reply. 

"Come  in  out  o'  the  sun,"  the  captain  said; 
and  he  came  into  the  shade  of  the  veranda  and  sat 
down  on  the  steps,  with  his  back  turned. 

He  had  no  pack.  He  was  coatless,  in  a  gray 
flannel  shirt,  a  leather  belt,  and  stained  overalls. 
A  bare  toe  showed  through  a  break  in  his  shoe. 

Captain  Jim  tried  him  with  various  inquiries: 
"Come  far?"  "Purty  tired,  eh?"  "Lookin'  fer 
work?" 

[219] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


No  answer.  He  did  not  even  turn  around.  He 
sat  looking,  apparently,  at  the  pound  nets  in  the 
meadow  across  the  road. 

" Hungry?"  the  captain  asked,  and  he  replied 
with  an  unintelligible  dumb  grunt. 

"Well,"  the  captain  said,  "come  along  and  have 
a  drink  first." 

He  rose  painfully  and  followed  into  the  bar, 
silent,  looking  at  the  floor.  The  captain  decided 
he  was  either  dumb  or  had  "a  button  loose  some- 
where." He  would  not  speak.  He  would  not  look 
at  them.  He  gulped  down  his  whisky  straight, 
turned  at  once  and  shuffled  back  to  his  place  on 
the  steps.  The  captain  ordered  a  plate  of  dinner 
sent  out  to  him.  He  took  it,  as  silent  as  a  dog, 
and  ate  it  from  his  fingers,  discarding  the  knife 
and  fork,  his  back  to  them  all. 

"Give  'm  anything  he  wants,"  the  captain 
ordered,  shook  his  head — with  pity — and  went 
home  to  his  own  meal. 

He  was  an  old  man  himself,  with  a  white  head 
of  hair  and  a  white  fringe  of  whiskers  so  fine  and 
so  fluffy  that  he  looked  like  a  "four-o'clock" — 
like  a  ripe  dandelion  gone  to  seed — with  his  pink 
scalp  glowing  through  its  aureole  and  his  tanned 
skin  brown  under  his  beard.  There  are  babies 
that  look  like  wise  and  solemn  old  men.  Captain 
Jim  looked  like  one  of  those  babies  in  a  beard; 
and  his  favorite  oath — "By  damn" — came  won- 
deringly  from  a  small  mouth  of  red  lips  that  sucked 

[220] 


W.    T. 

on  the  stem  of  his  pipe  as  if  the  bowl  of  it  were  full 
of  modified  milk, 

He  was  the  postmaster  and  the  customs  officer 
of  the  port;  he  owned  the  fishing-tug  and  the 
pound  nets;  and  he  employed  all  the  men  of  the 
village  who  would  work  in  his  boats.  He  was  build- 
ing another  tug  and  needed  hands  to  help  with 
her.  The  old  sailor  looked  as  if  he  might  be  of 
some  use. 

Captain  Jim,  after  dinner,  proposed  it  and  was 
answered  by  a  grunt  which  he  accepted  as  assent- 
ing; and  when  the  men,  returning  to  their  work, 
reappeared  in  the  meadow  where  the  tug's  keel 
had  been  laid,  Captain  Jim  led  the  new-comer  to 
join  them. 

"What's  yer  name?"  he  asked,  on  the  way. 

He  got  no  answer. 

He  said:  "All  right.  I'll  call  you  'Sam.'  I 
s'pose  you  can  swing  an  adz?" 

They  came  among  the  oak  timbers  that  were 
being  cut  out  for  the  boat's  ribs.  Captain  Jim 
held  out  an  adz  to  him.  He  drew  away  with  a 
nervous  shrinking  from  the  tool,  and  when  the 
captain  asked,  sharply,  "What's  the  matter?"  he 
looked  down  at  his  hands,  held  them  out,  open, 
and  showed  a  deformity  that  he  had  been  concealing. 

The  little  finger  of  each  hand  was  closed  down 
flat  on  the  palm,  as  if  paralyzed. 

"Huh!"  Captain  Jim  said.  "How'd  you  do  that?" 

The  question  was  asked  in  a  tone  that  was  scarcely 

[221] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


more  than  mildly  curious,  but  it  had  the  most  amaz- 
ing effect  on  the  old  sailor.  He  had  his  hands  still 
out  in  front  of  him,  and  his  wrinkled  gaze  was  fixed 
on  them  pathetically.  They  began  to  tremble  in 
a  shuddering  palsy  that  crept  up  his  arms  to  his 
neck  and  set  his  teeth  chattering  and  fluttered  his 
breath. 

The  captain  caught  him  by  the  shoulder.  "Sit 
down,"  he  said.  "You're  dog-tired.  There.  That's 
all  right.  Now." 

The  old  man  sat  down  weakly  on  a  log  and  took 
his  head  in  his  hands.  He  shook  as  if  he  had  a  chill. 

When  the  tremor  had  passed  Captain  Jim  said: 
"Better,  eh?  Well.  When  you  feel  like  work  come 
over  an*  help  us  on  the  steam-box.  Know  how  to 
warp  boards,  eh?  .  .  .  Come  away,  boys.  Don't 
bother  him.  He's  a  bit  touched." 

They  did  not  bother  him.  They  did  not  even 
appear  to  notice  him.  And,  though  they  watched 
him  and  speculated  about  him  all  the  afternoon, 
they  did  it  with  that  cunning  of  village  curiosity 
that  seems  so  indifferent  and  is  so  secretly  keen. 

He  took  his  place  among  them  at  the  steam-box, 
and  his  crippled  hands  did  not  seem  to  interfere 
with  his  work.  But  he  refused  to  wield  an  ax  as 
he  had  refused  the  adz;  he  continued  dumb;  and 
when  the  afternoon  was  done  he  took  his  supper  on 
the  hotel  veranda  at  the  captain's  expense,  ac- 
cepted a  corn-cob  pipe  and  a  plug  of  tobacco,  and 
wandered  away  up  the  beach  in  the  fading  light. 

[222] 


W.    T. 

He  did  not  reappear  until  the  morning.  Sub- 
sequently it  was  found  that  he  had  taken  posses- 
sion of  a  deserted  shack  in  a  hollow  behind  the  cap- 
tain's farm,  where  a  bend  in  the  shore-line  met  the 
trickle  of  a  swamp. 

"I  seen  a  man  had  hands  like  that  afore,"  Cap- 
tain Jim  said.  "He  done  it  handlin'  grain-bags. 
Yeh.  When  they  ust  to  team  it  down  here  an'  load 
it  into  schooners — afore  the  railroad  was  built  up 
yonder.  But  he  'ain't  been  a  longshoreman.  He's 
been  a  deep-sea  sailor  er  I'll  eat  my  hat.  Wonder 
what  he's  doin'  away  up  here,  anyway." 


Port  Derby  is  hundreds  of  miles  from  the  ocean 
and  ten  miles  from  a  railroad,  even.  The  mail 
arrived  on  a  buckboard  once  a  day.  The  fish 
were  taken  to  a  shipping  port,  on  the  tug,  once 
a  week.  Between  fishing  and  farming  the  little 
community  supported  itself  in  a  contented  isola- 
tion, and  if  old  "Sam"  had  wished  to  escape 
the  world  he  could  not  have  chosen  a  better 
hermitage. 

If  he  had  wished  to  escape  the  notice  of  his 
fellow-men  he  could  not  have  chosen  a  worse  one. 
He  was  as  much  discussed  as  a  murder  trial  in  town. 
Was  he  crazy?  Was  he  a  criminal  in  hiding?  Was 
he  really  dumb?  How  had  he  lost  his  hair?  What 
had  happened  to  his  hands?  Where  did  he  come 
from?  Why  had  he  left  his  home? 

[223] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


The  belief  that  he  was  an  imbecile  was  weakened 
when  it  was  seen  with  what  ingenuity  he  fitted  up 
his  shack,  making  himself  a  sort  of  bake-oven  of 
stones,  taking  useless  blocks  of  wood  from  the  boat- 
building and  nailing  planks  to  them  for  benches, 
cutting  fir  branches  for  a  bed,  mending  his  roof 
with  rotted  canvas  from  the  wharf  and  painting 
it  over  with  tar,  unraveling  old  nets  to  make  him- 
self fishing-lines  for  rusty  hooks  that  had  been 
thrown  away  by  the  village  boys,  and  in  everything 
proceeding  as  rationally  as  a  Robinson  Crusoe. 
The  suspicion  that  he  was  a  criminal  hi  hiding  could 
not  endure  after  it  was  observed  that  he  avoided 
strangers  less  than  he  did  the  acquaintances  of  his 
working-hours  and  seemed  more  uneasy  with  the 
benevolent  Captain  Jim  than  with  anybody  else. 
His  incredible  hairlessness  was  explained  by  a 
young  doctor — summoned  to  the  village  to  set  the 
broken  leg  of  one  of  the  boat-builders — who  gave 
it  out  that  Sam  was  the  victim  of  a  skin  disease 
with  a  sesquipedalian  scientific  name.  But  on  the 
mystery  of  where  he  had  come  from  or  why  he  had 
come  nothing  happened  to  throw  any  light. 

One  of  the  men  stole  up  to  the  shack  at  night 
and  peeped  through  a  crack  in  the  boarding.  He 
came  away  with  a  report  that  the  old  man  sat  for 
hours  by  his  lantern,  looking  at  his  hands.  Cer- 
tainly he  used  an  amount  of  oil  that  was  not  ac- 
counted for  until  the  village  found  that  his  light 
burned  every  night  till  sunrise.  Some  small  boys, 

[224] 


W.    T. 

who  hid  behind  the  bushes  at  dusk  and  pelted  his 
shanty  with  beach  pebbles,  were  driven  off,  panic- 
stricken,  by  an  unearthly  bellow  close  behind  them 
in  the  trees — a  hoarse,  inhuman  noise  which  they 
could  not  describe  except  in  terms  of  terror.  When 
Captain  Jim  heard  of  it  he  threatened  all  the  boys 
of  the  village — and  their  parents — with  all  the 
punishments  of  his  wrath  if  any  youngster  so  much 
as  hooted  at  Sam  on  the  street.  And  thereafter 
the  poor  wretch  was  left  to  his  misery  in  peace. 

Captain  Jim  gave  him  clothes  and  bedding,  sent 
cooked  food  to  his  shack  while  he  was  away  from 
it,  "stood"  him  drinks  in  the  bar,  lent  him  a  boat 
in  which  to  go  fishing  for  mud-cats  up  the  creek, 
and  paid  him,  as  well,  for  his  work  on  the  boat- 
building or  in  the  garden.  In  return  for  it  all  he 
did  not  get  more  gratitude  than  could  be  expressed 
in  a  grunt. 

"He's  got  somethin'  on  his  mind,  that's  all," 
Captain  Jim  decided.  "It's  got  him  a  bit  touched. 
Knowed  'n  old  sailor  up  to  Duluth  like  that — on'y 
his  was  religion.  He'll  come  through.  He  hangs 
'round  down  to  the  hotel  now,  's  long 's  no  one  speaks 
to  him.  Leave  'm  alone." 

They  were  willing  to  "leave  'm  alone."  Their 
curiosity,  by  this  time,  had  died  a  natural  death. 
They  accepted  Sam  jocularly  as  a  half-witted  old 
mute  who  was  amusing  when  he  was  not  too  pig- 
headed. 

And  then  one  morning,  after  the  new  tug  had 

[225] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


been  launched  and  the  work  of  calking  the  deck 
seams  was  in  progress,  Captain  Jim,  while  over- 
seeing the  men,  stepped  back  against  a  loose  tim- 
ber, lost  his  balance,  and  fell  backward  into  the 
creek.  Before  the  others  could  more  than  drop 
their  tools  Sam  screamed,  "Cap'n!  Cap'n!"  and 
dived  overboard.  And  the  men  were  so  amazed 
at  the  sound  of  his  voice  that  they  stood  staring 
at  the  pair  hi  the  water  as  if  they  had  seen  a  dead 
man  come  to  life. 

The  captain  had  been  a  good  swimmer  in  his  day, 
but  he  was  dazed  by  his  fall,  and  for  a  moment, 
when  he  came  to  the  surface,  he  beat  the  water 
feebly  with  the  palms  of  his  hands,  gasping.  Sam 
had  him  by  the  collar  in  an  -instant  and  held  him 
out  of  water  to  the  shoulders  till  he  caught  his 
breath.  Then  they  struck  out  together  for  the 
bank. 

When  they  had  found  .bottom  and  stood  up  drip- 
ping in  the  water-weeds  Captain  Jim  turned  on 
his  rescuer.  "Well,  by  damn!"  he  cried.  "You 
old  mud-turtle!"  and  thumped  him  on  the  back. 
"It  was  you,  was  it?  What  d'you  mean!  Get  up 
out  o'  this.  D'you  want  to  kill  yerself?"  He 
shoved  Sam  up  the  bank  before  him,  calling  upon 
all  the  men  to  witness  the  ancient  folly  of  this 
reprobated  old  son  of  a  sea-cook.  "What  d'you 
think  o'  that!"  he  cried,  wiping  the  trickle  of  water 
out  of  his  eyes  and  grimacing  in  a  doubtful  attempt 
to  grin  down  an  emotion  that  was  not  acknowledg- 

[£26] 


W.    T. 

able.  "What  d'you  think-  Th'  old-  Well, 
by  damn!" 

Sam  ran  his  hands  down  his  sides,  squeezing 
the  water  from  his  shirt.  He  stooped  to  wring  out 
his  trousers  legs  stolidly.  He  said  nothing. 

Some  of  the  men  came  down  the  plank,  with 
the  clumsy  inquiries  of  an  awkward  solicitude  for 
the  captain.  He  did  not  understand  the  way  in 
which  they  looked  at  Sam;  he  had  not  heard  the 
scream  that  had  betrayed  the  old  sailor's  voice. 

"Are  y'  all  right,  Cap'n?"  they  asked  him. 

"All  right,"  he  quavered.  "O*  course  I'm  all 
right.  Little  water.  Come  on  here,  Sam.  Come 
on  an*  have  a  drink  an*  get  off  them  wet  clothes. 
Course  I'm  all  right.  Go  on  with  yer  work." 

They  went  back  to  the  deck,  and  Captain  Jim, 
still  unaware  of  Sam's  return  to  the  use  of  his 
tongue,  took  him  to  the  hotel.  It  was  late  in  the 
afternoon;  a  chill  wind  had  begun  to  blow,  and 
the  captain,  for  all  his  jovial  and  hearty  gratitude, 
shivered  so  much  that  after  a  brief  glass  he  sent 
Sam  to'  his  shack  and  hurried  home.  Very  much 
shaken  and  chilled  through,  he  went  to  bed. 

5 

"Sophy,"  he  said  that  evening  to  his  daughter, 
as  he  sat  up,  smoking,  among  his  pillows,  "that  old 
boy  can't  winter  it  in  a  shack.  He'll  freeze  stiff. 
Better  give  'm  the  room  over  the  kitchen.  He'll 
carry  wood  an'  do  chores  fer  you,  anyway.  Eh?" 

[227] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


"Well,"  she  said,  taken  aback,  "he's  pretty  feeble, 
ain't  he?" 

"No!"  the  captain  cried.  "Feeble!  I  thought 
it  was  Johnny  had  me  by  the  neck.  Feeble  nothin' ! 
He  works  's  good  's  the  best  o'  them — where  he 
knows  how." 

"He  won't  chop  the  wood,"  she  said.  The  whole 
village  had  discovered  his  aversion  to  the  use  of 
an  ax. 

"No,"  he  reflected.  "He's  a  bit  queer  .about 
that.  He  ain't  strong  in  his  top  story.  But  he's 
harmless,  girl.  An'  we've  treated  him  like  a  dog — 
leavin*  him  live  in  that  swamp — " 

"He  wouldn't  let  you  do  anything  else." 

"That's  so.  That's  right.  Well,  I'll  make  him 
come  if  I  have  to  move  the  shack  to  do  it." 

The  captain's  house  was  a  relic  of  the  ante- 
railroad,  days  of  Port  Derby's  prosperity.  It  was 
a  building  of  some  pretensions,  with  a  Colonial 
pillared  porch  and  a  roof-top  belvedere.  And  his 
daughter  was  a  middle-aged  spinster  of  precise 
habits  who  was  a  neat  housekeeper  and  proud  of 
her  house.  She  did  not  relish  the  prospect  of  ad- 
mitting this  uncanny  old  outcast  to  a  place  in  it; 
the  room  over  her  kitchen  was  her  sewing-room, 
stored  with  blankets,  winter  bedding,  household 
linen,  and  a  thousand  things  that  she  did  not  wish 
to  remove.  Moreover,  one  fanciful  old  man  at  a 
time  was  all  she  desired  under  her  care — for  the 
captain  had  his  peculiarities. 

[228] 


W.    T. 

It  was  not  that  she  objected  to  having  all  the 
inner  door-sills  painted  twice  a  year,  as  if  they 
were  aboard  a  ship,  and  she  let  him  use  a  lantern 
in  his  bedroom,  although  a  lamp  surely  would  have 
looked  better,  but  she  had  noticed  of  late  that  he 
had  begun  to  be  careless  about  his  clothes,  that  he 
slept  heavily  in  the  afternoons,  that  he  depended 
too  much  upon  the  stimulants  at  the  bar.  And 
when  she  found,  treasured  up  under  his  bed,  a 
big  tin  biscuit-box  filled  with  misered  plugs  of 
tobacco  of  which  many  had  gone  moldy,  she  real- 
ized that  the  captain  was  failing.  She  would  have 
a  happy  life  as  the  captain  grew  worse  and  Sam 
was  added  to  her  burden! 

But  the  captain  had  an  obstinate  temper.  It 
was  bad  policy  to  oppose  him  outright.  She  had 
to  humor  him,  to  wheedle  him,  and  to  get  her  own 
way  while  pretending  to  give  him  his.  It  was  for 
this  reason  that  when  the  story  of  how  Sam  had 
spoken  came  to  her — from  one  of  the  men  who  called 
to  see  how  the  captain  was — she  went  straight  to 
her  father  with  her  indignation.  "A  nice  old  man! 
After  all  you've  done  for  him!  Why,  he's  been 
making  fools  of  all  of  us." 

"What's  the  matter,  girl?" 

"Why,  that  old  Sam —pretending  he  couldn't 
talk." 

"What?"  The  captain  sat  upright.  "Is  he 
talkin'!" 

"Yes!    All  the  men  heard  him." 

[229] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


"Where?     When?" 

She  told  him  artfully,  working  herself  into  a  fine 
resentment  against  "the  old  scamp."  And  the 
captain  listened,  staring  at  her  like  a  snowy  owl. 

"I  wouldn't  trust  him!"  she  cried.  "I  wouldn't 
put  anything  past  him.  He's  no  fool.  He's  bad. 
Of  all  the  double-faced —  I  s'pose  he's  been  laugh- 
ing at  us  behind  our  backs  all  the  time.  He's  done 
something  wrong.  That's  what  he's  done.  Why, 
you  could  tell  it  by  the  look  of  him!  I'd  be  afraid 
to  have  him  near  the  place.  He  might  murder  us 
all  in  our  beds.  I  never  heard  of  such  a  thing. 
The  old  liar — if  I  do  say  it."  And  so  endlessly, 
while  the  captain  listened  with  a  "Huh!"  that 
sounded  as  if  he  were  really  half  convinced,  but 
signified  merely  that  there  was  matter  for  new 
thought  in  the  affair  and  that  he  was  reconsider- 
ing it. 

He  made  no  reply  to  her  then  nor  later  in  the 
day  when  he  rose  for  dinner,  and  she  supposed  that 
he  had  weakened  in  his  kindly  feeling  for  the  hypo- 
critical Sam.  He  did  not  go  down  to  the  boat  that 
afternoon,  but  sat  smoking  and  thinking  and  tak- 
ing "cat-naps"  in  his  chair.  Once  he  remarked  that 
the  cold  weather  would  be  coming  on  and  inquired 
about  the  woodpile.  "Ought  to  get  a  couple  o' 
loads  o*  that  driftwood  fer  the  fireplace,"  he  said. 
"Wonder  if  there's  much  of  it  on  the  beach  this 
year." 

She  did  not  know.    It  was  a  peculiarity  of  the 

[230] 


W.    T. 

beach  that  there  was  one  spot  where  the  wood  came 
ashore  in  abundance — great  trees  that  had  been 
uprooted  by  the  rains  and  carried  out  into  the  lake, 
ships'  timbers,  the  loosened  planks  of  derelicts,  and 
all  the  wreckage  of  storms  and  freshets.  The 
natives  of  Port  Derby  went  there  to  gather  their 
winter's  firing,  saving  their  own  trees. 

The  captain,  after  an  early  supper,  while  it  was 
still  light,  filled  his  pipe  and  started  .off  across  his 
fields  to  see  the  cove  where  the  wood  came  in. 
And  it  was  not  till  he  had  gone  that  his  daughter 
remembered  that  Sam's  shack  stood  near  the  edge 
of  this  same  cove.  Even  so,  she  was  in  doubt 
whether  the  captain  had  deceived  her  with  a  rather 
senile  cunning  or  whether  the  whole  thing  was  an 
innocent  coincidence. 

It  is  probable  that  the  captain  did  not  quite 
know,  himself.  But  it  is  certain  that  when  he 
came  upon  Sam,  sitting  on  a  scoured  log  at  the 
water's  edge,  he  was  not  surprised  to  see  him. 

"Well,  Sam,"  he  said,  "they  tell  me  you've 
found  yer  voice." 

6 

The  men  at  the  boat  had  been  nagging  the  old 
man  in  Captain  Jim's  absence,  venting  upon  him 
some  of  that  same  spleen  which  the  captain's  daugh- 
ter had  felt  when  she  learned  that  they  had  all  been 
"made  fools  of";  and  Sam  was  obviously  worried 
and  dejected.  He  did  not  look  up  at  the  sound 

16  [2811 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


of  the  captain's  voice.  He  continued  gazing  out 
at  the  sunset,  his  elbows  on  his  knees,  his  chin  sup- 
ported on  his  cramped  hands,  smoking  sadly. 

The  captain  struck  a  match  and  sat — to  relight 
his  pipe — on  the  other  end  of  the  log.  "Well," 
he  said,  "I  come  down  to  see  if  there  was  much 
wood  here  fer  the  whiter.  Pick  up  more  logs  here 
in  a  day  than  you  could  cut  down  in  a  week.  Cold 
weather's  comin',  Sam.  You'll  freeze  stiff  in  that 
shack.  I  was  tellin'  my  girl  to  get  a  room  ready 
fer  you — over  the  kitchen,  where  it  '11  be  warm. 
You  can  do  her  chores  fer  yer  board — if  you 
want  to." 

Sam  stopped  puffing  at  his  pipe,  but  he  did  not 
turn  around. 

"We're  gettin'  old,"  the  captain  went  on.  "Got 
to  have  a  warm  bed  when  you're  old.  I  ust  to  be 
able  to  sleep  on  cargo  an'  never  notice  it.  Well, 
well.  I  remember  once — "  And  he  rambled  off 
into  reminiscences  of  his  rough  youth  when  he 
had  sailed  the  Great  Lakes  and  been  a  "terrible 
feller." 

They  were  reminiscences  of  the  easy  love-affairs 
of  an  able-bodied  seaman,  of  sailors'  fights  in  water- 
front "dives,"  of  smuggling  adventures  in  the  days 
when  he  had  run  a  schooner  between  the  mouth 
of  the  Niagara  River  and  the  Canadian  Port 
Credit — before  the  use  of  the  telegraph  put  an  end 
to  that  sort  of  "skylarkin"' — and  of  "bounty- 
jumping"  in  ports  along  the  American  shore  dur- 

[232] 


W.    T. 

ing  the  Civil  War.  If  there  was  a  noticeable 
strain  of  moral  obliquity  running  through  them 
all,  it  was  not  because  the  captain  was  uncon- 
scious of  it.  He  had  been  thinking  about  Sam  all 
day,  and  these  apparently  idle  recollections  were 
given  artfully. 

Sam's  pipe  went  out;  he  sat  with  it  in  his  hands, 
staring  at  the  darkening  water  and  listening  like  a 
man  mesmerized.  The  sun  had  set;  an  early 
autumn  moon  rose  behind  them.  Once  or  twice 
Sam  muttered  to  himself.  And  once  he  began  in 
a  dry  squeak  of  a  voice,  "Cap'n" — but  the  cap- 
tain did  not  pause.  Sam  sighed  and  moved  un- 
easily. The  captain  continued  his  amiable  confes- 
sions in  a  friendly,  soothing  tone. 

"Cap'n,"  the  old  man  said,  hoarsely,  "what  'd 
you  'a*  done  if — "  His  voice  fell  away  into  silence 
irresolutely. 

"If  they'd  ketched  me?"  the  captain  asked.  He 
was  at  the  end  of  his  story  of  the  bounty-jumping. 
"Well,  I  s'pose  I'd  been  rushed  to  the  front  on 
the  first  train.  But  they  didn't  ketch  me."  He 
chuckled.  "Not  them." 

Sam  shook  his  head.  "If  you  'd  been  out  'n  a 
Boat  an'  the  water  near  all  gone,  an' — " 

"What  boat?" 

"The  Bristol's:9 

The  captain  leaned  forward,  intent.  "Ship- 
wrecked?" 

Sam  sank  in  upon  himself  again;  he  fumbled  at 

[283] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


his  forehead  with  a  hand.  "Ay,  shipwrecked.  Me 
— an* — *'  He  either  could  not  remember  or  his 
mind  wandered.  "In  the  boat,"  he  said.  "An*  the 
water  all  gone — an'  the  heat  till  yer  brain  'd  ache." 
He  shook  his  old  lizard's  head  again  weakly. 
"Hot— hot." 

The  captain  signified  a  professional  understand- 
ing. "Yeh?" 

"An*  we  had  nuthin*  but  the  end  o*  one  keg  o* 
water,**  he  said,  staring  ahead  of  him  as  if  he  saw 
in  that  vast  expanse  of  lake  the  scene  that  was  in 
his  mind's  eye.  "It  was  goin'  by  thimblefuls. 
Seven  of  us.  An*  our  tongues  swollen  so  we  couldn't 
shut  our  jaws.  An' the  mate  says:  *  Boys,  it's  time 
to  draw  lots.  There's  too  many  of  us.  Take  yer 
choice.  We'll  all  die  together  if  we  don't,'  he  says. 
'All  of  us!'  An*  my  mouth  so  dry  I  couldn't  eat 
the  biscuit  no  more  than  it  was  sand.'* 

The  captain  waited,  listening,  with  his  head  on 
one  side,  watching  him.  The  moonlight  had  grown 
strong  enough  to  make  a  faint  shadow  on  the  beach. 
When  Sam  continued  silent  he  said:  "Well,  in  a 
case  like  that  there,  I  s'pose  there's  nothin'  else  to 
do.  I  remember  once — '* 

Sam  licked  his  lips.  "So  we  drawed  lots — the 
long  one  an'  the  short  one.  An'  young  Tom  got 
the  long  one — an'  then,  when  it  come  to  me,  I  got 
the  short  one.  An'  nobody  said  a  word,  except  one 
o'  the  men  sort  o'  laughed." 

He  turned  suddenly.  "  WTiat  would  you  'a*  done?*' 

[234] 


W.    T. 

he  cried.  "With  the  wife  home — an*  the  baby — 
waitin'  fer  you?  An'  young  Tom  with  nobody 
dependin'  to  him." 

The  captain  replied,  coaxingly,  "Well,  what  'd 
you  do,  Sam?" 

"  Mates,'  I  says,  'I'm  a  married  man.  I  got  a 
wife,  mates,'  I  says,  'an'  a  little  one.  Is  it  fair/ 
I  says,  'that  I  go,  that's  got  them  dependin'  to 
me,  an'  Tom  here's  got  no  one?  Is  it  right?'  I 
says.  An'  they  didn't  say  a  word.  We  was  all 
played  out.  I  could  scarce  speak,  my  mouth  was 
so.  'Is  it  right?'  I  says.  'No!  If  any  one  goes,  it 
ought  to  be  Tom,'  I  says.  'He's  got  no  one.  He's 
near  dead  now.  What  good  is  he?  He  can't  help 
none.  'Tain't  right!  I'm  a  strong  man.  I  got  a 
woman  to  keep.  I  got  a  little  one— 

"Sure,  sure!"  the  captain  soothed  him.     "What 
.'d  they  do?" 

"It  was  Tom.  Tom  did  it.  He  was  sick.  He 
didn't  care  what  happened  to  him.  He  said  he'd 
sooner  go  than  do  it — than  shove  me  off.  We'd 
nothing  to  do  it  with  but  the  ax.  So  we  changed 
lots — Tom  an'  me.  An'  he  said  if  we'd  do  it  while 
he  was  asleep —  That's  all  he  asked — to  do  it 
( while  he  was  asleep." 

"Asleep?"  the  captain  cried.  "Do  you  mean  to 
say  he  could  go  to  sleep?" 

"Asleep.    He  was  sick." 

He  had  begun  to  tremble.  "U-up  in  the  nose  o* 
the  boat,"  he  said  in  a  low,  shaken  voice.  "He 

[235] 


crawled  up  there  an' — an'  laid  down.  An'  after 
it  was  dark — " 

"Well,  Sam,"  the  captain  cut  in,  quickly,  "that's 
the  way  those  things  happen.  A  man's  got  to  fight 
fer  his  life  sometimes.  He  ain't  accountable.  In 
a  boat  like  that — dyin*  o'  thirst  an'  you  with  a 
wife  an'  fam'ly  to  think  o'.  It  couldn't  be  helped, 
I  guess.  It  just  had  to  be.  You  want  to  ferget 
it.  It's—" 

Sam  said:  "I  couldn't  do  it.  I  sat  there  all 
night — an'  couldn't  do  it.  In  the  dark.  I  heard 
him  turn  over.  He  was  talkin'  crazy  to  himself 
— wantin*  water.  It  was  hot — hot — an'  still.  An* 
no  one  said  a  word." 

The  captain  clucked  his  tongue  commiseratingly. 
"Tut,  tut!  It's  all  past  an'—" 

"An'  then  a  little  breeze  sprung  up,  an*  it  got 
a  little  light,  an'  I  thought  if  I  didn't  do  it  mebbe 
he'd  wake  up  an'  go  back  on  what  he  said.  An* 
so — "  He  clutched  his  hands  in  front  of  him 
agonizedly.  "I — I — " 

"Sam!"  the  captain  cried.  "Now  never  mind! 
Never  mind!  I  don't  want  to  hear.  You  don't 
want  to  be  fhinkin*  about  it.  That's  what's  the 
matter.  You  been  thinkin*  about  it  too  much. 
You—" 

"Listen!"  Sam  screamed.  "Listen!  He  wasn't 
cold  before  they  seen  a  sail.  Right  against  the  sun 
when  it  come  up!  A  sail!  A  brig  that  took  us  all 
aboard — him,  too — an'  me — with  the  blood  onto 

[236] 


W.    T. 

my  hands —  He  held  them  out  to  the  lake, 
clenched,  shaking  them  fiercely  as  if  they  were  not 
a  part  of  him,  but  something  hateful,  something 
criminal,  and  guilty  against  himself. 

The  captain  grasped  him  by  the  arm.  *  "Stop!" 
he  said.  "Stop  it!  You've  got  to  stop  it.  You've 
got  to  ferget  it.  Listen  to  me.  It  wasn't  your 
fault.  Case  like  that.  Man's  got  to  fight  fer  his 
life.  When  he's  got  a  wife  an'  fam'ly— 

"Ah!"  Sam  groaned.  "Wife  an'  fani'ly."  They 
didn't  think  o'  that.  In  the  fo'c'sle — they  turned 
against  me.  Them  that  'd  been  in  the  boat  with 
me.  Yes!  From  the  day  they  dropped  him  over- 
board with  their  prayers  an'  their  caps  off.  They 
didn't  think  o'  that.  It  makes  a  might  o'  differ- 
ence when  yer  tongue  ain't  swelled  up  like  a  boot 
in  yer  mouth  an'  achin*  so  you'd  go  mad.  Yes! 
Wife  an'  fam'ly.  She  turned  against  me.  Her,  too. 
Ev'ry  one.  All  o'  them." 

"What?    Yer  wffe,  too?" 

"Ay,  an'  my  wife,  too.  It  was  all  right  the  first 
night  I  got  back.  An'  then  one  o'  the  boys  told 
her."  He  dropped  his  voice  to  a  broken  breathiness. 
"He  was  her  brother.  Tom  was  her  brother." 

"Good—!" 

"Tom  was  her  brother — an'  she  took  the  little 
one  an*  went  back  home  without  a  word.  Not  a 
word.  An*  when  I  went  to  tell  her — to  tell  her  how 
it  was — her  father  came  out.  He  was  like  to 
killed  me." 

[2871 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


The  captain  let  him  be.  He  sat,  crouched,  a 
figure  of  despair  in  the  desolate  moonlight,  his 
mouth  in  his  hands.  The  waves  broke  and  broke 
before  him,  falling  forward  in  a  hissing  sprawl  on 
the  pebbles. 

"I  went  away,"  he  said,  talking  to  the  water. 
"I  shipped  an*  went  away — an*  no  one  knowed 
about  it  aboard  an*  I  lay  awake  nights  thinkin' 
of  it — because  no  one  knowed.  An'  they  was  hot 
nights — hot  an'  still.  An'  I  heard  some  one  turnin' 
over  an*  talkin'  to  himself.  An'  no  one  said  a  word, 
an'  I  had  to  bite  into  my  blanket  to  keep  from — 
There  was  a  man  named  Durkin.  Him  an'  me  had 
a  watch  together.  An'  I  wanted  some  one  to  ask. 
I  wanted  some  one  to — to —  No  one  knowed  about 
it.  We  was  frien's — him  an'  me.  An'  I  told  him. 
I  told  him.  An'  there  it  was  again.  I  could  hear 
them  whisperin'  behind  my  back.  I  could  see  them 
lookin'  at  me  when  they  thought  I  wasn't  takin* 
notice.  An'  no  one  said  a  word  about  it.  An' 
the  little  spot  on  the  back  o'  my  hand  kep'  spreadin' 
— bare — till  the  hair  was  all  off.  An'  off  my  arm." 

He  held  his  hands  out  and  looked  at  them. 

"There,  on  the  back — like  where  there'd  been — 
there'd  been  blood — a  little  round  spot,  it  began. 
Greasy."  He  clapped  his  hands  to  his  face  again, 
as  if  to  cover  his  eyes  against  the  sight  of  them. 
"An'  they  seen  it!"  he  cried.  "They  seen  it  an' 
knowed  what  it  was.  An*  I  went  ashore  an'  got 
away  an'  I  didn't  come  back.  But  I  knowed  it!" 

[238] 


W.    T. 

He  threw  out  his  arms.  "I  knowed  it.  I  had  it. 
Ev'rywhere  I  went  I  had  it.  I  had  to  ask.  I  had 
to  tell.  I  couldn't  ferget  it.  I  was  marked.  Head 
an*  hands."  He  tore  off  his  cap  and  raised  his 
leprous  skull  to  the  light.  "Look  at  me,"  he  wailed 
as  if  to  the  night  and  the  heaven  and  the  indifferent 
waves.  "Look  at  me!  Head  an'  hands  an'  face  an' 
body — marked!  Marked!  An'  ev'ry  one  seen  it. 
Ev'ry  one  knowed  it.  Ev'rywhere!" 

The  captain  wiped  his  neck  and  wrists  in  his  hand- 
kerchief and  swore  feebly.  Sam  had  collapsed  upon 
himself,  huddled  on  the  log. 

"Sam,"  he  said,  "part  of  what  happened — it — 
it's  happened.  There's  no  more  to  be  said  about 
it.  It's  past  an*  done.  But  part  of  it's  nothin* 
but  yer  own  damn  imagination.  There's  somethin' 
wrong  with  yer  skin.  It's  a — a  disease.  Any 
doctor  '11  tell  you  the  name  of  it.  Cure  it  mebbe. 
An'  yer  fingers  you  hurt  handlin'  heavy  weights. 
You've  been  roustaboutin' — workin*  on  the  docks, 
'ain't  you?" 

Sam  said,  sepulchrally:  "I  been  ev'rywhere. 
All  over  the  world,  I've  been.  Doin*  ev'rythin'. 
An*  ev'rywhere  I  went  there  was  some  one  that 
wouldn't  let  me  be  till  he'd  found  out.  An'  then — " 

"Well,"  the  captain  put  in,  guiltily,  "that's  what 
I  say.  That's  what  it  is.  Now  here's  where  the 
thing  ends.  I  don't  say  a  word  to  no  one — an' 
you  don't.  Not  a  word.  You've  had  this  thing  on 
yer  mind,  an'  now  you've  got  rid  of  it.  I'll  see  that 

[2391 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


no  one  bothers  you.  You  needn't  speak  to  a  soul 
if  you're  afraid  o'  what  you  might  tell.  Just  keep 
quiet  an*  mind  yer  bus'ness  an'  ferget  all  this — this 
stuff." 

He  patted  Sam  on  the  shoulder.  "It  weren't 
your  fault.  It  might  'a'  happened  to  any  one.  It 
might  'a'  happened  to  me.  An'  here  we  are,  now, 
a  pair  of  old  hulks  together — me  an*  you — on'y 
I've  got  into  a  snug  harbor  an'  you've  been  batterin' 
around  crazy-fashion.  You  come  up  to  my  house 
an'  I'll  see  you  have  enough  t*  eat,  a  warm  bed, 
an'  ev'rythin'  to  make  you  comfort 'ble.  No  one  '11 
bother  you.  No  one  '11  speak  to  you  'less  you  want 
it.  An'  'n  a  little  while  you'll  ferget  about  this 
bus'ness,  an'  ev'rythin'  '11  be  all  right  again.  Eh?" 

He  picked  up  Sam's  cap  and  put  it  on  him,  found 
him  his  pipe  in  the  sand,  and  coaxed  him  to  his 
feet.  "Come  on,  now.  We'll  make  you  snug's 
an  oF  cricket.  You'll  be  settin'  by  yer  fire,  come 
winter,  with  a  glass  o'  grog  in  yer  hand,  happy  's 
— happy  's  a  cat.  Come  on.  Eh?" 

Sam  was  holding  back.  "Wait,"  he  said,  hoarsely. 
"Wait  till  to-morr'.  I'll— " 

"Will  you  come  then?" 

Sam  nodded. 

The  captain  remembered  his  daughter.  "Well, 
then,  all  right.  P'raps  that's  best.  The  girl'll 
have  to  get  yer  room  ready.  That  '11  give  her  time. 
Now  you  go  to  bed,  Sam,  an'  have  a  good  sleep. 
In  the  mornin'  you'll  feel  better.  This  's  where 

[240] 


W.    T. 

this  thing  ends.  You're  going  to  be  all  right  after 
this." 

"G'night,"  Sam  said,  and  staggered  off  through 
the  sands  toward  his  shack. 

The  captain  watched  him  go — through  the  serene 
moonlight  toward  the  shade  of  the  willows  that 
draped  black  along  the  edge  of  the  swamp.  There, 
suddenly,  he  threw  his  hands  up  over  his  head — 
and  at  the  same  instant  disappeared  in  the  shadows. 
The  captain,  having  stood  a  moment  gazing  after 
him,  turned  and  went  home  to  his  bed. 


In  the  morning,  after  a  scene  of  anger  with  his 
daughter,  he  posted  down  to  the  boat  and  found 
that  Sam  had  not  appeared  for  work.  He  waited 
an  hour,  and  then  hurried  off  to  the  shack.  The 
door  was  open.  The  place  was  in  disorder — the 
lantern  thrown  upon  the  floor,  the  bedding  dragged 
aside,  the  bench  overturned  under  the  table — and 
Sam  had  gone. 

Sam  had  gone.  And  all  the  efforts  of  the  captain 
to  learn  in  what  direction  he  had  gone,  to  find  any 
one  who  had  seen  him  on  his  way,  or  to  hear  anything 
of  him  in  any  of  the  neighboring  villages — all  were 
unavailing.  He  had  gone.  He  had  told  his  story 
again — and  he  had  not  waited. 

"It  was  my  fault,"  the  captain  says.  "I  oughtn't 
to  made  him  tell  it.  But  there  it  is.  That  can't 
be  helped.  He  says  himself  he  tells  it  ev'rywhere 

[241] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


he  goes.  No  use  pretendin'  he's  dumb.  Any  one 
can  see  he's  got  somethin'  on  his  mind  an*  they 
pump  it  out  of  'm.  No  use  beatin*  around  the  way 
he's  doin'.  Get  him  back  to  me  here.  I'll  look 
after  him.  Put  somethin'  in  the  papers  about  him, 
an'  tell  'em  to  write  Cap'n  Jim  Johnson  if  they've 
see  'm.  Cap'n  Jim  Johnson,  Port  Derby.  Eh? 
They'll  know  him  by  that  'W.  T.'  right  here  on  the 
inside  of  his  arm.  A  blue  anchor  fouled  with  a 
'  W  over  one  fluke  an'  a  'T'  over  th'  other.  Don't 
ferget  that,  now.  That  was  his  name— 'W.  T.'" 


FROM  THE  LIFE 
Hon.  Benjamin  P.  Divins 


HON.  BENJAMIN  P.  DIVINS 

DIVINS,  Benjamin  Parmalee,  banker, 
politician;  b.  on  farm,  Sullivan  Co.,  N. 
Y.,  Apr.  15,  1853;  s.  John  Edward  and 
Sarah  (Parks)  D.;  ed.  common  sch.;  m. 
Mary  Johanna  Van  Slack,  of  Danville, 
N.  Y.,  Nov.  21,  1888.  Began  commer- 
cial career  as  clerk  in  P.  L.  Boulton's 
general  store,  Cappsville,  N.  Y.,  1870. 
Started  in  business  for  himself  at  Dan- 
ville, 1875.  President  Danville  First 
Natl.  Bank  1895-1900;  v.-p.  1901-08;  p. 
1909-  :  del.  Nat.  Convn.,  1884;  can- 
didate N.  Y.  Assembly,  1890;  state  sena- 
tor 2  terms,  1901^5 ;  Dir.  Ulster  Electric 
Co.,  Ltd.,  Public  Service  Power  Co., 
Ontario  Suburban  Ry.  Co.,  Sullivan 
County  Land  and  Investment  Co.,  Cats- 
kill  Mortgage  Co.,  etc.,  Trustee  Danville 
School,  Schuyler  Trust  Co.,  Meth.  Or- 
phan Asylum,  Hope  Cemetery,  etc. 
Addreat:  310  Walnut  St.,  Danville, 
N.  Y.— Who's  Who. 

1 

TT  is  not  difficult  to  choose  the  most  significant 
•••  day  to  chronicle  in  the  life  of  the  Honorable 
Benjamin  Parmalee  Divins,  nor  to  decide  what  are 
the  illuminating  incidents  to  use  in  a  brief  portrait- 
study  of  him.  The  red-letter  day  of  his  life  was 
the  day  that  he  drove  over  from  the  railroad  at 
Cappsville  to  his  brother's  farm  among  the  foot- 
hills of  the  Catskills  in  Sullivan  County.  And  the 
illuminating  incidents  occurred  after  he  arrived 
and  met  his  brother. 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  had  hired  a  livery  rig  in  Cappsville — a  buggy 
that  was  decrepit  and  stiff  in  the  springs,  and  a 
horse  that  was  shaggy  with  its  winter  coat  and  as 
slow  as  rheumatism.  The  six  miles  of  hill  roads  had 
been  washed  down  to  bed-rock  by  the  April  rains, 
and  the  drive  would  have  been  a  long  boredom  of 
jolted  discomfort  to  the  Honorable  Ben  if  it  had 
been  anything  at  all  to  him.  As  a  matter  of  fact 
it  was  nothing.  It  did  not  register  on  him.  Al- 
though it  was  a  road  that  should  have  been  full  of 
memories  of  his  youth,  he  drove  it  blindly,  his  eyes 
focused  on  empty  space  over  the  horse's  ears,  the 
reins  slack  in  his  hands,  his  collar  turned  up,  his 
hat  pulled  down,  leaning  forward  in  his  seat,  his 
mind  occupied.  His  unbuttoned  overcoat  showed 
that  he  was  wearing  broadcloth  and  clean  linen, 
as  became  a  man  of  his  position  in  life.  Under  the 
brim  of  his  hat  his  eyes  were  a  cold  blue,  pinched 
in  wrinkles. 

It  should  have  been  one  of  the  romantic  moments 
of  his  life.  Here  he  was — the  most  successful  man 
that  the  neighborhood  had  ever  produced — coming 
back,  for  the  first  time  in  twenty  years,  to  revisit 
the  scenes  of  his  early  hardships.  And  it  would 
have  been  romantic  to  him  if  it  had  not  been  that 
he  was  thinking  of  his  future,  not  of  his  past.  And 
that  was  characteristic  of  the  Honorable  Ben.  He 
was  "a  go-ahead  man,"  his  admirers  said.  His 
critics  put  it  that  he  was  "always  on  the  make." 
His  victims  expressed  another  view  of  the  same 

[246] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


quality  when  they  accused  him  of  having  no  con- 
science. 

He  drove  steadily,  indifferently,  up  hill  and  down, 
past  the  wood-lots,  the  rocky  meadows,  the  shabby 
farm-houses,  the  weather-beaten  barns.  The  spring 
had  come  late,  and,  though  a  May  sunlight  was  fit- 
fully warm  on  the  road,  a  March  wind  was  boister- 
ous in  the  upper  branches  of  the  wayside  trees  and 
came  plunging  across  the  woods  like  the  sound  of 
surf.  He  ignored  it. 

He  showed  no  interest  in  anything  until  he  came 
to  the  Divins  woods  and  saw  ahead  of  him,  on  a 
cleared  hillside,  the  Divins  homestead.  The  reins 
tightened  mechanically  in  his  hands.  The  horse 
stopped. 

Down  the  path  from  the  farm-house  to  the  road 
there  was  approaching  a  tall,  gaunt  man  who 
walked  like  a  moving  frame  of  bones,  lifelessly. 
He  was  dressed  in  clothes  that  had  been  worn  and 
washed  and  sun-faded  down  to  the  essence  and  com- 
mon nature  of  all  cloth — an  old  felt  hat  the  color  of 
mildew,  a  brown  cotton  shirt,  stained  trousers,  and 
dried  cowhide  boots.  The  house  from  which  he 
came  was  an  unpainted  frame  wreck  that  had  been 
bleached  and  rotted  by  the  inclement  mountain 
seasons  until  it  looked  as  broken  and  dejected  as 
the  man  himself.  He  had  an  alder  pole  in  one  hand 
and  a  rusty  tin  can  in  the  other. 

The  Honorable  Ben  studied  him.     He  studied 

the  house.    Remembering  it  as  he  had  known  it  in 

17 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


his  boyhood,  he  might  have  looked  at  it  with  dis- 
gust for  his  brother's  shiftlessness.  He  looked  at 
it  rather  as  if  it  were  a  property  on  which  he  was 
compelled  to  take  a  mortgage.  He  looked  at  it 
obviously  with  an  eye  to  his  own  interests.  He 
looked  at  it  predaciously,  speculatively,  but  with 
distaste. 

Distaste  was  uppermost  in  the  way  he  looked 
at  the  man.  He  had  not  seen  his  brother  for  fifteen 
years,  but  he  had  no  doubt  that  here  was  Matt 
himself.  It  might  have  been  a  hired  man,  but  he 
knew  that  Matt  could  not  even  pay  the  wages  of 
such  a  slouching  "buckwheater"  as  this.  It  was 
evidently  Matt — going  fishing. 

He  waited,  watching  him  approach.  Matt  did 
not  raise  his  eyes  till  he  was  close.  Then  he  took 
in  the  horse  first  before  he  turned  his  mild  attention 
to  the  driver.  He  accepted  the  challenge  of  Ben's 
keen  stare  with  no  sign  of  recognition. 

"Well?"  Ben  said.    "Don't  you  know  me?" 

2 

He  got  no  answer.  Matt  looked  at  his  clothes, 
at  his  hands,  and  then  at  the  horse  again  in  a  silent 
acceptance  of  him  that  was  worse  than  indifference. 
It  was  the  sort  of  acceptance  that  you  might  get 
from  a  friend's  dog  that  dislikes  you  and  lets  you 
pass  without  a  sound,  without  so  much  as  a  sniff 
at  your  heels,  regarding  you  inscrutably. 

Ben's  mouth  was  sufficiently  tight-lipped  at  its 

[248] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


best.  It  tightened  perceptibly  at  his  brother's 
manner.  He  snapped  out,  "I  want  to  see  you." 

Matt  did  not  reply,  "Well,  here  I  am."  He  had 
apparently  recognized  the  horse;  it  was  one  that 
he  had  sold  to  the  livery-stable,  and,  shifting  his 
fishing-pole  to  the  hand  that  held  his  bait-can,  he 
patted  the  animal's  flank  thoughtfully. 

"I  want  to  see  you  alone  somewhere,"  Ben  said, 
with  a  growing  impatience. 

Matt  nodded.  He  did  not  say,  "  Come  along  up 
to  the  house."  He  did  not  even  give  the  invitation 
tacitly  by  moving  to  get  into  the  buggy  so  that  they 
might  drive  together  to  the  barn.  He  stepped  back 
from  the  horse,  took  the  can  of  worms  in  his  free 
hand,  and  said,  "I'm  goin'  fishin'." 

He  said  it  placidly,  and  he  met  Ben's  glare  with 
an  impenetrable  mildness  of  melancholy  brown 
eyes. 

Ben  caught  up  the  reins.  "Geddap!"  he  cried. 
"Get  over  there."  He  jerked  the  horse  aside  into 
the  ditch. 

Matt  seemed  more  interested  in  the  patient  be- 
wilderment of  the  horse  than  in  the  irascibility  of 
the  driver. 

He  was  known  to  his  neighbors  as  something  of 
a  philosopher.  He  had  a  theory  of  the  earth's 
electric  currents  from  which  he  predicted  the 
weather.  He  knew  the  medicinal  properties  of 
some  of  the  local  plants,  and  dosed  himself,  for 
liver  chills  and  rheumatism,  with  his  own  prescrip- 
ts] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


tions.  He  knew  enough  of  law  to  keep  out  of  liti- 
gation with  a  quarrelsome  neighbor  who  let  his 
cattle  run  wild,  and  enough  of  politics  to  vote  in- 
dependent of  his  party  and  to  despise  the  cam- 
paigns of  the  Honorable  Ben.  On  account  of  his 
ill  health  and  his  meditative  habits  he  was  the 
least  successful  farmer  on  the  ridge,  and  his  wife 
and  his  neighbors  did  not  respect  him  for  it.  But 
his  dog  and  his  cattle  always  made  a  friend  of  him, 
and  so  did  his  son — who  had  recently  died  of  a 
gunshot  wound.  Matt  had  been  suffering  with  a 
chronic  dejection  since  the  accident. 

Ben  tied  the  horse  to  a  tree,  took  a  small  black 
bag  from  the  buggy,  and  came  back  with  it.  "I 
want  to  see  you  alone  somewhere,"  he  repeated. 

Matt  looked  at  the  bag.  "I'm  goin*  fishin'.  If 
you  want  to  come  along — " 

"Fishing!"  Ben  cried.  "D'you  think  I  came  up 
here  to  go  fishing!  My  time's  valuable,  if  yours 
isn't." 

"Well—"  Matt  took  off  his  hat  and  rubbed  the 
back  of  his  head  indifferently.  He  had  a  thatch 
of  thick  hair,  like  the  pelt  of  a  wild  animal,  rusty 
brown  in  spots  and  shaggy.  "I  promised  the  missus 
I'd  get  some  perch  fer  dinner — if  they'll  bite. 
Water's  cold  yet  fer  perch." 

"Here!"  Ben  shouted.  _"  I've  got  no  time  to  fool. 
I've  got  something  to  say  to  you,  and  I  want  you 
to  hear  it." 

Matt  shouldered  his  pole.     "You  kin  stay  here 

[250] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


if  you  want  to.  Er  you  kin  come  an'  sit  down  in 
the  punt  an*  not  waste  my  time."  He  turned  away 
unperturbed.  "I  got  to  catch  some  fish,"  he  said 
as  he  moved  off  down  the  road. 

The  Honorable  Ben  stood  in  a  helpless  rage  that 
was  nearly  pitiful.  Pale,  his  lips  trembling,  he 
glared  after  Matt  with  a  despairing  ferocity.  He 
blinked  as  if  his  eyes  were  burning.  He  set  his  teeth 
and  swallowed,  breathing  through  dilated  nostrils, 
with  a  sound  that  was  almost  a  moan  of  plaintive 
fury.  But  he  did  not  turn  and  fling  his  satchel  into 
the  buggy  and  drive  away.  No.  He  stood  there, 
watching  Matt  down  the  road  and  slowly  gaining 
control  of  himself. 

When  Matt  turned  off  into  the  woods  and  dis- 
appeared he  put  down  his  satchel,  wiped  his  fore- 
head with  a  shaking  hand,  pulled  his  hat  down  to  his 
eyes,  picked  up  his  satchel  with  a  jerk,  and  followed. 


In  the  fields,  on  one  side  of  the  road,  the  first 
strawberry  blossoms  were  as  white  as  wedding 
wreaths  in  the  grass.  On  the  other  side,  in  the 
warm  wood  shade  the  anemones  were  May-Daying, 
like  picnicking  children  in  holiday  muslins,  delight- 
ing in  the  breeze  that  set  them  dancing.  And  where 
Matt  turned  off  on  a  narrow  path  among  the 
maples  the  spring  beauties  were  already  coyly  hid- 
den, awaiting  some  sentimental  rendezvous,  in 
coquettish  blushes,  pink  and  white. 

1251] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


The  Honorable  Ben  had  no  eyes  for  them.  And 
if  Matt  had  noticed  them  as  he  passed  it  would 
only  have  been  to  observe  the  progress  of  the 
season  by  them,  as  automatically  as  a  city  man 
notes  the  hour  on  the  street  clocks.  He  was  deeply 
ruminative.  He  did  not  look  behind  him  to  see 
whether  Ben  was  following.  He  did  not  need  to. 
He  had  a  woodman's  ears,  and  Ben's  footsteps 
rustled  and  crackled  on  dead  leaves  and  fallen 
branches. 

The  path  joined  an  old  wood  road  that  led  through 
a  second-growth  forest  of  beech  and  maple — a  forest 
of  gray  tree-trunks  and  green  underbrush,  where 
the  sunlight  was  caught  in  a  net  of  low-hung 
branches  and  tossed  among  entangling  leaves.  Matt 
went  placidly  toward  the  glimmering  streak  of 
water  at  the  end  of  the  vista.  Ben  followed  in  a 
furious  silence. 

He  could  hardly  have  expected  a  more  friendly 
reception.  His  relations  with  his  brother  had  not 
been  friendly — not  since  their  school-days — not 
since  Ben  had  hired  himself  to  the  owner  of  the 
Cappsville  general  store  and  Matt  had  remained 
at  home  to  work  his  father's  farm.  When  the  father 
died  he  left  the  farm  to  both  of  them,  and  Ben 
had  deeded  his  half  of  the  property  to  Matt  in 
return  for  a  mortgage  on  the  whole  of  it.  He  had 
taken  advantage  of  Matt's  impracticality  in  order 
to  saddle  him  with  a  much  larger  mortgage  than 
the  place  was  worth,  and  then  he  had  sold  the 

[2521 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


mortgage  to  the  Sullivan  County  Land  and  Invest- 
ment Company,  of  which  he  afterward  became  a 
director.  They  squeezed  the  interest  out  of  Matt 
implacably.  When  he  could  no  longer  meet  it 
they  foreclosed.  Matt  was  now  paying  them  rent. 
He  was  allowed  to  occupy  the  farm  only  because 
no  one  else  wanted  it.  And  he  might  well  have 
regarded  his  brother  as  the  heartless  leech  who  had 
bled  and  impoverished  him  all  his  life. 

Curiously  enough,  he  did  not  so  regard  him. 
"Well,"  he  would  say,  "that's  the  way  Ben  is" 
— with  a  sort  of  philosophic  and  superior  contempt. 
It  was  the  contempt  of  a  wronged  man  who  knows 
that  he  has  done  nothing  to  deserve  the  injustice 
that  has  been  done  him.  All  the  anger  was  on  Ben's 
side.  He  felt  toward  his  brother  as  if  Matt  had 
been  an  opponent  who  had  lost  to  him  in  a  card 
game,  and  who  blamed  him  instead  of  blaming  his 
own  unskilfulness  or  his  ill  luck.  The  game  was 
over.  He  had  come  to  Matt — with  his  winnings 
in  his  little  satchel — prepared  to  talk  sense  to  him. 
And  Matt,  walking  away  from  him  like  a  con- 
temptuous dumb  animal,  compelled  him  to  follow 
ignominiously.  Every  step  that  he  took  added  to 
the  insult. 

Matt  came  to  the  swampy  edge  of  the  lake  where 
there  was  an  unfinished  landing-place  made  of 
stakes  driven  in  like  a  row  of  piles  to  hold  a  filling 
of  loose  rocks.  And  tied  to  one  of  the  stakes  was 
a  flat-bottomed  punt,  unpainted,  coffin-shaped, 

[253] 


FROM    THE    LIFF 


home-made,  as  crude  as  one  of  those  "stone-boats" 
in  which  the  Sullivan  County  farmer  sledges  the 
stones  from  his  fields. 

Matt  was  stooping  to  grope  for  a  pair  of  oars 
in  their  hiding-place  under  the  trunk  of  a  fallen 
hemlock  when  his  brother  came  to  the  wharf,  saw 
the  punt,  and  saw  it  as  shiftlessness  and  poverty 
made  manifest  in  the  shape  of  a  boat.  He  scowled 
at  it.  He  scowled  at  the  unfinished  wharf.  There 
was  a  gruesome  fatality  connected  with  the  his- 
tory of  the  wharf  and  he  knew  it,  but  he  did  not 
intend  to  refer  to  it — not  yet.  He  was  holding  that, 
to  lead  up  to  it  as  his  climax. 

He  began  suddenly  in  a  blustering  voice:  "Why 
don't  you  fix  up  your  place?  Your  house  's  a  dis- 
grace. No  fence.  No  steps.  Not  fit  to  live  in!" 

Matt  said,  calmly,  as  if  addressing  the  oars  in 
his  hands:  "It  ain't  my  house  any  more,  an'  you 
know  it.  Besides,  I  don't  need  a  fence  there.  The 
fields  are  fenced  an'  the  dog  stays  'round  the  front 
door.  He  keeps  out  the  cattle.  I  never  got  'round  to 
fixin'  the  porch  steps.  We  don't  need  'em,  anyway." 

"You  get  'round  to  going  fishing." 

Matt  untied  the  boat  and  put  his  fishing-tackle 
into  it.  "I  promised  the  missus  I'd  get  some  perch." 

Ben  said,  "Hell!"  with  the  grunted  disgust  of 
intelligence  balked  by  stupid  reiteration. 

Matt  climbed  into  the  boat  and  held  it  to  the 
wharf,  waiting  for  Ben  to  take  his  place  in  the  stern. 

"How  far  are  you  going?" 

[254] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


Matt  moved  his  head  in  the  direction  of  the 
lower  lake.  Ben  hesitated  a  moment,  his  lips 
working.  Then  he  got  in  and  sat  down,  mutter- 
ing profanity,  and  put  the  bag  on  the  seat  be- 
side him  because  the  bottom  of  the  boat  was  wet 
and  dirty. 

Matt  fitted  his  oars  to  the  rowlocks  and  shoved 
off.  A  gust  of  wind  helped  him  to  get  under  way. 
A  burst  of  sunlight  was  blown  across  the  lake  in 
a  sudden  glory  with  the  flying  clouds.  He  began 
to  row,  beaten  from  his  course  by  sudden  side 
buffets  of  wind  and  bringing  the  head  of  the  boat 
back  mechanically  without  looking  'round  to  see 
his  direction. 

"Where  're  you  going?'*  Ben  demanded. 

Matt  replied,  "Down  to  Alder  Point." 


They  both  had  boyhood  memories  of  Alder  Point, 
and  it  may  have  been  these  that  kept  Ben  silent 
and  preoccupied  for  the  rest  of  the  way.  Or  he 
may  have  been  thinking  of  what  he  had  to  say  and 
how  he  was  to  say  it.  In  either  case  he  was  so  deep 
in  thought  that  even  when  Matt  had  dropped  his 
anchor-stone  off  Alder  Point  and  shipped  his  oars 
and  taken  up  his  fishing-pole  Ben  did  not  speak. 
Matt  looked  up  at  him  a  moment  from  his  can  of 
bait  and  began  to  crowd  his  hook  with  a  bunch  of 
wriggling  worms.  He  said,  siniling  grimly,  "Been 
doin'  purty  well,  Ben?" 

[255] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


It  startled  Ben.    "Who?"  he  asked,  hoarsely. 

Matt  did  not  reply.  He  flung  his  line.  "Boys 
growin'  up?" 

Ben  made  as  if  to  speak,  checked  himself,  looked 
at  his  watch,  and  asked,  in  a  harsh  tone:  "Well, 
what  about  your  place?  What  do  you  want? 
Money?" 

"What's  that  to  you?" 

"They're  throwing  it  up  tome  for  letting  one  of 
my  family  live  here  in  this  sort  of  way.  It  isn't 
my  fault,  is  it?  What's  the  matter  with  you? 
Don't  you  care  how  you  live?  I'd  think  your  wife 
'd  want  to  do  better  if  you  wouldn't." 

Matt  replied:  "I  didn't  have  your  luck,  Ben. 
I  didn't  marry  money." 

"If  you  think  I  got  anything  out  of  my  wife's 
money —  She's  given  more  to  her  church  than  she 
ever  had  when  I  married  her." 

After  an  interval  of  thought  Matt  observed: 
"She's  took  to  religion,  eh?  Well,  that's  better 
than  rum." 

"What's  rum  got  to  do  with  it?" 

"Nuthin',"  Matt  said,  "'cept  that  I  hear  your 
boys  are  goin'  in  fer  it  pretty  strong." 

Ben  did  not  reply. 

Matt  fished.  "People  nowadays,"  he  reflected, 
"they  don't  seem  to  think  there's  any  hell — so  I 
guess  we'll  all  be  happy  in  heaven,  uh?  Think 
you're  goin'  there,  Ben?"  He  added,  in  interpre- 
tation of  his  brother's  eye-puckered  silence:  "Don't 

[256] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


care  whether  you  do  er  not,  uh?  Not  botherin' 
you  any." 

"My  religion's  my  own  concern." 

"I  guess  that's  right."  He  nodded.  "I  guess 
that's  right." 

The  boat  swung  'round  on  its  anchor-line  with  the 
shifting  wind.  Matt  drew  in  his  hook  to  see  if  it 
had  caught  on  any  of  the  brown  lily-pads  that  had 
not  yet  lifted  themselves  to  the  surface  of  the  water. 
"No  perch  comin',  I  guess." 

The  reference  to  perch  was  too  much  for  Ben's 
irritability.  He  broke  out:  "I  tell  you  what's 
the  matter  with  you — you're  lazy.  You'd  sooner 
sit  in  a  boat  all  day  waiting  for  a  five-cent  fish  than 
go  out  in  the  field  and  earn  an  honest  dollar.  That's 
why  you're  living  the  way  you  are.  It's  shiftless- 
ness.  It's  laziness — sheer,  damn  laziness!" 

Matt  had  put  the  butt  of  his  pole  under  his  leg 
and  taken  out  his  pipe.  "Well,  Ben,"  he  said, 
"youve  worked  hard." 

"You're  damn  right  I  have." 

"You've  worked  hard,  an'  your  two  boys  have 
gone  to  the  devil  with  drink — " 

"That's  none  of  my  doing." 

"An*  your  wife's  trying  to  buy  fergiveness  fer 
you  with  the  money  you  sold  yer  soul  fer.  An* 
you're  just  about  as  happy  as  if  you'd  gone  to  hell 
already.  You've  worked  hard,  an*  you've  got  what 
you've  been  workin'  fer.  Well,  you  can  have  it.  I 
don't  want  it." 

[257] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


Ben  controlled  himself,  in  a  white  rage.  Matt  lit 
his  pipe  deliberately. 

"You  folks  that  make  money  call  us  failures. 
You're  the  failures."  He  puffed.  "You  remind  me 
of  the  bees  in  a  hive — workin*  yerselves  to  death 
to  store  up  honey  that's  no  use  to  you.  The  bumble- 
bee's got  more  horse  sense.  When  it  gets  enough 
fer  its  family  it's  satisfied.  You  tell  me  I'm  lazy 
because  I'd  sooner  be  a  bumblebee.  An'  I  tell  you 
you're  just  sort  o*  foolish." 

Ben  said,  sneeringly,  "I'd  like  to  buy  you  at 
my  price  and  sell  you  at  yours." 

Matt  nodded.  "You  can't  buy  what  ain't  fer 
sale.  That's  been  your  trouble  right  along.  You've 
been  so  busy  gettin'  money  you  haven't  got  any  o* 
the  things  that  money  can't  buy — the  things  that 
're  worth  more  than  money.  You're  a  failure,  Ben. 
I'm  sorry  fer  you.  That's  the  feelin'  I  have.  I'm 
sorry  fer  you." 

"Is  that  all?    Is  that  all  you  have  to  say?" 

Matt  took  up  his  rod  again.    "That  '11  do  me." 

"Good."  Ben  stretched  out  his  arms  to  bare 
his  wrists  like  a  man  about  to  deal  cards.  "Now," 
he  said,  in  a  cold  passion,  "listen  to  me.  There  were 
some  people  over  on  the  other  side  of  the  lake  last 
summer.  They  used  to  row  over  here  to  get  milk 
and  eggs  and  so  forth — from  you.  Do  you  re- 
member?" 

Matt  nodded. 

"They  complained  to  your  wife  one  day  about 

[258] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


that  wharf  of  yours.  She  said  it  was  your  wharf, 
and  like  everything  you  did  it  was  a  failure.  She 
said  you  never  finished  anything  you  started  and 
never  started  anything  you  could  put  off.  She  said 
she  was  ambitious  when  she  married  you — a  girl 
of  good  education — wanted  to  be  a  school-teacher. 
You  were  studying,  then,  at  night,  and  she  thought 
you  were  going  to  be  another  Abraham  Lincoln. 
You  were  studying  law.  A  little  later  you  were 
reading  medical  books.  Then  you  took  to  reading 
newspapers  and  talking  politics.  You  studied  every- 
thing but  farming  and  did  everything  but  attend 
to  your  work.  She  saw  she'd  never  escape  from 
poverty  unless  the  boy  pulled  her  out  of  it.  And 
she  kept  him  at  school,  and  slaved  for  him  and 
pushed  him  along,  and  let  you  do  as  you  liked.  .  .  . 
Well?" 

Matt  looked  up,  with  the  gaze  of  a  man  whose 
thoughts  are  turned  inward  upon  himself  and  his 
past. 

The  brother  clenched  his  hand.  "That  boy 
tripped  on  your  wharf  and  shot  himself!  On  your 
wharf — the  wharf  you  were  too  lazy  to  finish.  He 
tripped  on  one  of  the  stakes  you  were  too  lazy  to 
even  off — and  killed  himself!  Those  people  told 
me  about  it  when  I  saw  them  in  town.  They  told 
me  your  wife  was  as  good  as  crazy — that  she  went 
around  like  a  madwoman,  stone  dumb — that  she 
never  even  shed  a  tear — that  you'd  killed  the  boy 
and  worse  than  killed  her.  They  found  out  that 

[259] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


you  were  related  to  me  and  they  asked  me  to  come 
up  here  and  try  to  do  something  for  your  wife." 
He  sat  back  with  a  contemptuous  gesture  of  with- 
drawal from  the  discussion.  "You  tell  me  I'm  a 
failure.  You!" 

Matt  said,  hoarsely:  "You  don't  understand. 
She  don't,  either.  I've  been —  All  my  life — " 
He  looked  down  at  his  feet,  clumsy  in  their  "cow- 
hides." "The  boy  was  an  accident.  It  might  have 
happened,  anyway.  A  woman  isn't  responsible  fer 
what  she  says  like  that." 

It  was  as  if  he  had  found  his  tongue  as  clumsy 
as  his  feet,  as  fumbling  as  his  hands,  and  struggled 
within  himself,  futilely,  without  expression,  be- 
wildered by  this  new  and  terrible  view  of  himself 
as  a  criminal  failure  in  life.  He,  who  had  always 
thought  of  himself  as  above  his  circumstances  and 
better  than  his  neighbors,  as  a  thinker  and  a  su- 
perior man! 

He  looked  up  at  hisHbrother  pathetically.  "I 
couldn't  do  the  way  you  did.  I  couldn't  go  on 
workin*  except  I  knew  what  I  was  workin*  fer. 
I  didn't  want  to  live  like  a  cow.  I  wanted  to  know 
what  we  were  all  livin'  fer.  I  didn't  want  to  make 
money  just  fer  the  sake  o'  makin'  money,  like  you 
fellas  in  the  city — " 

"Look  here,"  Ben  said,  fiercely,  "I  want  you 
to  understand  that  I  went  after  money  because  I 
had  brains  enough  to  see  that  no  one  could  live  a 
healthy  life  without  it.  Poverty — it  was  poverty 

[260] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


that  killed  your  boy,  because  you  hadn't  money 
enough  to  build  a  decent  wharf.  It's  your  poverty 
that  makes  your  wife  despise  you.  You  want 
money — that's  all!  You're  a  failure  because  you 
tried  to  live  without  getting  the  means  to  live  on." 

Matt  shook  his  head,  humped  over  his  knees. 
"What's  the  matter  with  things?  Why  'm  I— 
what  you  people  think  I  am,  when  I  tried  to 
be — what  I  did?  Why  are  you  what  you  are 
when  you  used  to  be" — he  choked  up — "y°u  used 
to  be  'Benny'?" 

That  fond  little  name  of  their  childhood  came 
upon  them  from  their  past  with  a  tender  appeal 
that  silenced  them.  They  stared  at  each  other, 
and  Matt  had  a  mist  of  tears  in  his  eyes. 

Ben  glanced  aside  quickly  at  the  green  edge  of 
Alder  Point.  "That's  got  nothing  to  do  with  it," 
he  muttered. 

The  sunshine  burst  upon  their  silence  with  a 
sudden  light  that  seemed  to  make  their  emotion 
public  and  improper.  The  Honorable  Ben  thrust 
his  forefinger  down  between  the  back  of  his  neck 
and  his  shirt-collar  and  made  a  pretense  of  easing 
the  pinch  of  the  linen.  "Look  here,"  he  said,  with 
a  determined  gruff  ness,  "I  came  up  here  to  say 
this:  I'm  looking  for  a  bit  of  land  to  build  on. 
The  wife  likes  the  country.  I  want  a  place  for  her 
to  live — in  case  of  trouble.  We  could  get  this 
land  around  here  for  a  song,  if  you'd  run  the  farm 
for  us  or  see  that  the  natives  didn't  steal  the  whole 

[261] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


damn  place  while  our  backs  were  turned.  What's 
the  land  worth  up  here?" 

"Seven  to  ten  dollars  an  acre." 

"You  could  make  farming  pay  here  as  well  as 
anywhere  if  you  had  the  capital  behind  you.  You 
could  work  it  on  shares  if  you  liked." 

Matt  said  nothing. 

"  Who  owns  this?"  He  waved  a  hand  to  the  shores 
of  the  lake. 

"A  man  named  Coddington." 

"Would  he  sell  the  whole  thing — lake  and  all?" 

"Yes.     I  guess  so." 

The  man  of  large  affairs  nodded  curtly.  "Take 
me  ashore  yonder  and  we'll  look  it  over." 

Matt  drew  in  his  forgotten  line  and  lifted  his 
anchor-stone  aboard.  Under  cover  of  the  action 
Ben  said,  "I  want  you  to  help  my  family,  now, 
Matt — and  I'll  help  yours." 

Matt  looked  at  the  stone.  "It  ain't  that,"  he 
reflected,  dully  ^  "There's  something  wrong.  If 
a  man  don't  make  money,  he  kills  his  children.  An' 
if  he  does,  they  kill  themselves.  There's  something 
wrong.  Look  at  you  an'  me.  Look  at  any  young 
uns  an*  then  see  what  they  grow  into.  Look  at 
how  a  man  starts  out  to  do  the  right  thing — an' 
can't." 

"Nonsense!"  Ben  said,  impatient  of  all  this 
moralizing.  "Nonsense!  Let's  look  at  the  land." 
He  rubbed  his  hands  together,  chilled  by  the  wind. 
"I  want  you  to  buy  it  for  me.  I'll  put  up  the 

[262] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


money — and  more,  too — but  I  don't  want  my  name 
to  appear.  Understand?  I  want  this  to  be  between 
us  two.  See?  Just—  Who's  that?" 


Matt  was  bending  forward,  busy  with  his  oars. 
The  boat  had  swung  around  so  that  its  nose  was 
pointing  toward  the  home  shore  again.  There  was 
a  man  in  a  topcoat  and  a  derby  standing  at  the 
landing. 

"Who  is  it?    Who's  that?" 

A  note  of  alarm  in  the  voice  startled  Matt  to 
attention.  He  caught  the  direction  of  Ben's  eyes 
and  turned  in  his  seat  to  look. 

The  man  was  a  stranger  to  him.  "I  dunno,"  he 
said.  "What's  the  matter?" 

Ben  reached  a  hand  to  his  satchel,  put  it  on  the 
bottom  of  the  boat  between  his  feet,  and  said, 
quietly:  "Wait.  Wait  a  minute.  I  think  I  know 
him.  Don't  row  in."  He  had  opened  the  bag. 
"In  case  anything  happens  I  want  you  to  buy  that 
land  for  me.  Understand?"  He  drew  out  a  package 
of  bank  bills  the  size  of  a  brick,  strapped  with 
elastic  bands.  He  stooped  to  conceal  his  action 
from  the  man  ashore,  and  threw  the  money  along 
the  bottom  of  the  punt  to  his  brother.  It  struck 
Matt's  boot.  "Whatever  there's  left  over  I  want 
you  to  just  put  away  safely  for  me.  I'll  trust  you." 

"What's  the  matter?" 

"Nothing.      Nothing.      It's   just    the    financial 

18  [ 263  ] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


stringency.  There's  been  trouble  at  the  bank. 
Things  will  be  tied  up  for  a  while.  I've  saved  this 
out.  Understand?  I  want  you  to  buy  the  land. 
Just  hide  that  somewhere  and  say  nothing  about  it." 

Matt  looked  down  at  the  money,  without  loosen- 
ing his  stiffened  hold  on  the  oars.  "What's  the 
matter?  Why  can't  you  buy  it  yerself  ?" 

Ben  glanced  at  the  shore.  The  wind  was  carrying 
them  slowly  toward  Alder  Point.  He  said:  "I'm 
in  a  little  difficulty — for  the  time.  That's  my 
wife's  money.  I've  saved  it  out  of  the  smash." 
His  impatience  showed  in  his  voice.  "She'd  be 
fool  enough  to  give  it  up.  Understand?  I  want 
you  to  buy  the  land  for  her  and  keep  what's  left 
over  until  I  see  you  again." 

Matt  drew  back  his  foot  from  the  package. 

Ben  said,  anxiously:  "I  want  you  to  work  the 
place  for  us  on  shares.  That's  what  I  came  up 
here  for.  Anything  you  need  you're  welcome  to, 
too.  Understand?  Just  take  what  you  want  your- 
self. I'll  trust  you.  You're  honest."  His  voice 
had  begun  to  grate  in  a  dry  throat.  "It's  money. 
That's  what  you  want — money.  Understand?  Fix 
yourself  up.  Make  your  wife  happy." 

Matt  did  not  move. 

" Listen!  I  can't  keep  that  money  myself.  The 
^bottom's  dropped  out  of  everything  for  me.  I've 
lost  everything  but  this.  They'll  take  it.  They'll 
take  everything.  I  want  you  to  keep  this  for  me. 
I'll  trust  you.  We'll  all  go  in  together.  You're 

[264] 


HON.    B.    P.    DIVINS 


getting  too  old  to  work.  I'll  see  that  you  don't 
have  to. ...  They  can't  touch  me.  I'll  get  out  of  it, 
I  guess.  But  they'll  pluck  me  to  the  last  cent. 
I  want  you  to  keep  this  for  me.  Take  it !  Take  it !" 

Matt  sat  motionless,  his  eyes  on  the  money,  as 
if  he  did  not  hear.  The  water  lapped  and  chuckled 
along  the  side  of  the  punt  maliciously  as  a  puff  of 
wind  hurried  them  toward  the  shore. 

"Say!  Say,  Matt.  Look  here.  For  God's  sake! 
It's  all  we  have.  Everything's  gone  to  smash. 
They've  been  watching  me  while  they — they've 
been  going  over  the  books.  That's  one  of  them 
at  the  landing.  He's  come  to —  Matt!  Take  it! 
Don't  let  them  get  it!  Matt!" 

Matt  shook  his  head,  without  raising  his  eyes. 

Their  progress  had  put  the  Point  between  them 
and  the  landing.  The  Honorable  Benjamin,  seeing 
that  he  was  hidden  from  the  man  on  the  wharf, 
crouched,  half  risen  from  his  seat,  grasping  the 
thwarts.  "G —  damn  it!"  he  cursed  in  a  fierce 
undertone,  "aren't  you  good  for  anything?  Won't 
you  even  save  yourself  and  all  the  rest  of  us  from 
the  poorhouse  now  that  you've  got  the  chance? 
That  man's  come  here  to  arrest  me!  Matt!  Hide 
it!  Hide  it!" 

Matt  did  not  move.  Ben  looked  back  over  his 
shoulder  at  the  lake,  reached  one  hand  toward  the 
money,  and  then  said  to  himself,  desperately, 
"  It  'd  float!" 

There  was  a  long  pause  and  silence.    The  crackle 

[265] 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


of  a  trodden  branch  sounded  from  the  laurel- 
bushes.  Ben  sprang  from  his  seat  in  a  passion  of 
angry  despair,  snatched  off  his  hat  and  flung  it  at 
his  feet,  plucked  from  his  pocket  a  bright  metal 
object  that  flashed  in  the  sunlight,  and  put  it  to 
his  mouth  in  both  hands,  holding  it  as  if  it  were  a 
flask  from  which  he  was  to  drink.  Then  a  little 
cloud  of  yellowish-blue  smoke  exploded  from  it 
and  blew  him  backward,  stiffly,  over  the  stern  of 
the  boat — and  his  face  was  still  distorted  with  an 
expression  of  anger  as  he  fell,  but  his  eyes,  meet- 
ing the  blaze  of  sunlight,  looked  surprised,  startled, 
as  if  he  had  suddenly  realized  what  he  had  done. 

And  when  the  man  from  the  landing  burst  through 
the  laurel-bushes — with  his  warrant  for  the  arrest 
of  the  president  of  the  wrecked  Danrflle  National 
Bank — he  found  an  old  farmer  with  a  pair  of  oars 
still  grasped  stiffly  in  his  hands,  sitting  in  a  coffin- 
shaped  punt,  staring,  horrified,  at  a  spot  of  blood 
and  bubbles  on  the  water  a  few  yards  from  shore — 
with  a  small  fortune  in  bank  bills  lying  in  plain 
view  at  his  feet. 


FROM  THE  LIFE 

Sir  Watson  Tyler 


SIR  WATSON  TYLER 

TYLER,   Sir    Watson,   K.C.B.,  6.  Coul- 

ton,  Ont.,  May  24,  1870;  ed.  pub. 
schools,  Univ.  of  Toronto,  grad.  1891 ;  m. 
Alicia  Janes,  1893.  Pres.  Coulton  Street 
Ry.  Co.,  Coulton  Gas  and  Electric  Co., 
Farmers'  Trust  Co.,  Mechanics'  Bank 
of  Canada,  Janes  Electric  Auto  Co., 
etc.  Donor  Coulton  Conservatory  of 
Music,  Mozart  Hall,  etc.  Founder 
Coulton  Symphony  Orchestra,  Bee- 
thoven Choir,  etc.  Conservative  leader. 
Senate,  1911.  Privy  Council,  Minister 
without  portfolio,  1912.  Knighted  1915 
for  services  to  the  Empire. — Canada's 
Men  of  Mark. 


stairs  that  Wat  descended — 
(He  had  been  christened  "Wat,"  not  "Wat- 
son."   He  made  it  "Watson"  later.    I  am  writing 
of  the  fall  of  1892,  when  he  was  twenty-odd  years 
old.) 

The  stairs  that  Wat  descended  on  that  crucial 
Sunday  morning  had  been  designed  by  an  architect 
who  had  aspired  to  conceal  the  fact  that  they  were, 
after  all,  stairs.  He  had  disguised  them  with  cush- 
ioned corner-seats  and  stained-glass  windows,  with 
arches  of  fretwork  and  screens  of  spindles,  with 
niches  and  turns  and  exaggerated  landings,  until 
they  were  almost  wholly  ornamental  and  honorific. 
They  remained,  however,  stairs — just  as  the  whole 

[269] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


house  remained  a  house,  in  spite  of  everything  that 
had  been  done  to  make  it  what  The  Coulton  Adver- 
tiser called  a  "prominent  residence."  And  to  Wat, 
that  morning,  those  stairs  were  painfully  nothing 
but  stairs,  leading  him  directly  from  a  bedroom 
which  he  had  been  reluctant  to  leave  down  to  a 
dining-room  which  he  was  loath  to  enter.  In  the 
bedroom,  since  daylight,  he  had  been  making  up 
his  mind  to  tell  his  family  something  that  must 
soon  be  told  to  them.  He  had  decided  to  tell  them 
at  the  breakfast-table;  and  he  could  have  forgiven 
the  architect  if  the  stairs  had  been  a  longer  respite 
than  they  were. 

In  a  dining-room  that  had  been  made  as  peevish 
with  decoration  as  the  stairs  he  found  his  father, 
his  mother,  and  his  two  sisters  already  busy  with 
breakfast  and  a  Sunday  paper,  which,  in  those 
early  days  of  Coulton,  was  imported  across  the 
border  from  Buffalo.  His  sisters  were  both  younger 
than  he  and  both  pertly  independent  of  tbeir 
elders,  and  they  did  not  look  up  from  the  illustrated 
sections  of  fashion  and  the  drama  which  they  were 
reading,  aside,  as  they  ate.  His  father  seemed 
always  to  seize  on  his  hours  of  family  leisure  to 
let  his  managerial  brain  lounge  and  be  at  rest  in 
the  comfortable  corpulence  of  his  body;  he  was 
stirring  his  coffee  in  a  humorous  reflectiveness  that 
was  wholly  self-absorbed.  Mrs.  Tyler  smiled  ap- 
prehensively at  her  son,  but  she  did  not  speak. 
She  did  not  care  to  disturb  the  harmony  of  the 

[270] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


domestic  silence.  Both  the  harmony  and  the  silence 
were  rare  and  pleasant  to  her 

Wat  sat  down,  and  humped  himself  over  his  fruit, 
and  began  to  eat  with  an  evident  lack  of  zest.  The 
dining-room  maid  came  and  went  rustling.  Mrs. 
Tyler  brushed  at  a  persistent  crumb  among  the 
ribbons  on  the  ample  bosom  of  her  morning  wrap- 
per, and  regarded  Wat  from  time  to  time  with 
maternal  solicitude. 

He  had  once  been  a  delicate,  fat  boy — before  he 
took  a  four  years'  college  course  in  athletics — and 
she  had  never  been  quite  convinced  of  the  per- 
manency of  his  conversion  to  health.  He  had  come 
home  late  the  previous  night,  and  he  looked  pale 
to  her.  His  lack  of  appetite  was  unusual  enough 
to  be  alarming.  He  did  not  begin  his  customary 
Sunday  morning  dispute  with  his  sisters  about 
"hogging"  the  picture  pages  of  the  newspaper. 

She  broke  out  at  last:  "What  is  it,  Wat?  Aren't 
you  well?" 

"N-no,"  he  stammered,  taken  by  surprise.  "I'm 
all  right." 

His  sisters  glanced  at  him.  He  was  unthinkingly 
afraid  that  they  might  see  his  secret  in  his  eyes. 
They  had  all  the  devilish  penetration  of  the  young 
female.  And  he  looked  down  his  nose  into  his 
coffee-cup  with  an  ostentatious  indifference  to  them 
as  he  drank. 

Naturally  they  accepted  his  manner  as  a  challenge 
to  them.  Millie  remarked  to  Ollie  that  he  seemed 

[271] 


FROM   THE   LIFE 


thin — which  was  far  from  true.  OIlie  replied,  with 
her  eyes  in  her  newspaper,  that  he  was  probably 
going  into  a  "decline."  He  pretended  to  pay  no 
attention  to  them;  but  his  mother  interfered,  as 
they  had  expected  her  to. 

"You've  no  business,  now,  making  fun  of  Wat 
about  his  health,"  she  said.  "You  know  he  isn't 
strong.  He's  big — but  he's  soft." 

"Soft!"  the  girls  screamed.  "Paw,  maw  says 
Wat's  soft!" 

It  is  incredible,  but — at  that  day,  to  everybody 
in  the  household  except  his  mother — Sir  Watson 
Tyler  was  a  joke.  And  it  is  incredible,  but — in 
spite  of  all  the  honorable  traditions  of  convention 
to  the  contrary — these  were  the  family  relations  in 
the  Tyler  home. 

Mr.  Tyler  turned  an  amused  eye  on  his  wife, 
and  she  appealed  to  him  with  her  usual  helpless 
indignation.  "Well,  I  think  you  ought  to  speak  to 
the  girls,  Tom.  I  don't  think  it's  very  nice  of  them 
to  make  fun  of  then*  mother." 

"But,  maw!"  Millie  laughed.  "You  say  such 
funny  things  we  can't  help  it." 

'I  don't.  You  twist  everything  I  say.  Wat 
isn't  strong.  You  ought  to  be  ashamed  of  your- 
selves." 

She  scolded  them  in  a  voice  that  was  uncon- 
vincing, and  they  replied  to  her  as  if  she  were  an 
incompetent  governess  for  whom  they  had  an  af- 
fectionate disrespect. 

[272] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


Wat  began  to  fortify  himself  with  food  for  the 
announcement  which  he  had  to  make.  He  ate 
nervously — determinedly — even,  at  last,  doggedly. 
His  mother  retired  into  silence.  His  sisters  con- 
tinued to  read. 

When  they  got  to  discussing  some  of  the  society 
news  he  saw  an  opportunity  of  leading  up  to  his 
subject;  and  when  they  were  talking  of  a  girl 
whom  they  had  met  during  the  summer,  at  the  lake 
shore,  he  put  in,  "Did  you  ever  meet  Miss  Janes 
there?" 

They  turned  their  heads  without  moving  their 
shoulders.  "Lizzie  Janes?" 

The  tone  was  not  enthusiastic.  He  cleared  his 
throat  before  he  answered,  "Yes." 

Millie  said,  superbly  casual:  "Uh-huh.  Isn't 
she  a  freak!" 

His  face  showed  the  effort  he  made  to  get  that 
remark  down,  though  he  swallowed  it  in  silence. 
His  mother  came  to  his  rescue.  "WTio  is  she, 
Wat?" 

"A  girl  I  met  this  summer.  I  went  over  there 
with  Jack  Webb." 

His  sisters  found  his  manner  strained.  They 
eyed  him  with  suspicion.  His  mother  asked, 
"What  is  she  like?" 

"Well,"  Millie  put  in,  "she  has  about  as  much 
style—!" 

Wat  reddened.  "She  hasn't  your  style,  anyway. 
She  doesn't  look  as  if  her  clothes — " 

[273] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


He  was  unable  to  find  words  to  describe  how  his 
sisters  looked.  They  looked  as  if  their  limp  gar- 
ments had  been  poured  cold  over  their  shoulders 
and  hung  dripping  down  to  their  bone -thin 
ankles. 

"I'm  glad  you  like  her,"  Millie  said.  "She's  a 
sight." 

He  had  determined  to  be  politic.  It  was  essential 
that  he  should  be  politic.  Yet  he,  the  future  leader 
of  a  conservative  party,  retorted:  "It  'd  do  you 
good  to  know  a  few  girls  like  her.  The  silly  crowd 
you  go  with!" 

"Lizzie  Janes!    That  frump!" 

He  appealed  to  his  mother.  "I  certainly  think 
you  ought  to  call  on  them,  mother.  They've  been 
mighty  good  to  me  this  summer  while  you  were 
away." 

"Well,  Wat,"  she  said,  "if  you  wish  it—" 

"You'll  do  no  such  thing!"  Millie  cried. 

The  squabble  that  followed  did  not  end  in  victory 
for  Wat.  It  was  Millie's  contention  that  they  were 
not  bound  to  receive  every  "freak"  that  he  might 
"pick  up";  and  Mrs.  Tyler — who,  in  social  matters, 
was  usually  glad  to  remain  in  the  quiet  background 
of  the  family — put  herself  forward  inadequately 
in  Wat's  behalf.  She  succumbed  to  her  husband's 
decision  that  she  "had  better  leave  it  to  the  girls"; 
he  ended  the  dispute  indifferently  by  leaving  the 
table;  and  Wat  realized,  with  desperation,  that  he 
had  failed  in  his  diplomatic  attempt  to  engage  the 

[274] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


family  interest  for  Miss  Janes  by  introducing  men- 
tion of  her  and  her  virtues  into  the  table  talk. 


He  went  back  up-stairs  to  his  bedroom  and  locked 
himself  in  with  his  chagrin  and  his  sentimental 
secret.  It  was  a  secret  that  showed  in  a  sort  of 
gloomy  wistfulness  as  he  stood  gazing  out  the  glass 
door  that  opened,  from  one  angle  of  his  room,  upon 
a  little  balcony  —  an  ornamental  balcony  whose 
turret  top  adorned  a  corner  of  the  Tyler  roof  with 
an  aristocratically  useless  excrescence.  You  will 
notice  it  in  the  picture  of  "Sir  Watson  Tyler's 
Boyhood  Home'*  in  The  Canadian  Magazine's 
article  about  him.  From  the  door  of  this  balcony, 
looking  over  the  autumn  maples  of  the  street, 
through  a  gap  between  the  opposite  houses,  Wat 
could  see  the  chimney  of  the  Janes  house. 

It  was  a  remarkable  pile  of  bricks,  that  chimney. 
All  around  it  were  houses  that  existed  only  as 
neighbors  to  that  one  supreme  house.  And  around 
those  were  still  others,  less  and  less  important, 
containing  the  undistinguished  mass  of  lives  that 
made  up  the  city  of  Coulton  in  which  she  lived. 
The  heart  of  interest  in  Coulton  had  once  been  his 
own  home  —  as,  for  example,  when  he  came  back  to 
it  from  college  for  his  holidays.  Now,  when  he 
returned  in  the  evenings  from  his  father's  office  he 
found  himself  on  the  circumference  of  a  circle  of 
which  Miss  Janes's  home  was  the  vital  center.  He 

[2751 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


saw  his  own  room  merely  as  a  window  looking 
toward  hers.  And  this  amazing  displacement  had 
been  achieved  so  imperceptibly  that  he  had  only 
just  become  acutely  conscious  of  it  himself. 

His  mother  and  his  sisters  had  spent  the  sum- 
mer on  the  clay-lipped  lake  shore  that  gave  the 
name  of  "Surf holm"  to  the  Tyler  cottage  in  the 
society  news  of  The  Coulton  Advertiser;  and  Wat 
and  his  father  had  remained  in  town,  from  Mondays 
to  Saturdays,  to  attend  to  the  real-estate  and  in- 
vestment business  that  supplied  the  Tyler  income. 
(They  also  owned  the  Coulton  horse-car  line,  but 
it  supplied  no  income  for  them.)  On  a  memorable 
Tuesday  evening  Wat  had  "stopped  in"  at  the 
Janeses*  on  his  way  down-town  with  his  friend 
Webb,  to  let  Webb  return  to  Miss  Janes  some  music 
that  he  had  borrowed.  And,  by  a  determining 
accident  of  fate,  as  they  approached  the  lamplit 
veranda  of  the  Janes  cottage,  Alicia  Janes  was  sit- 
ting behind  the  vine-hung  lattice,  reading  a  maga- 
zine, while  her  mother  played  the  piano. 

Observe:  There  was  no  veranda  on  the  Tyler 
"residence";  no  one  ever  sat  outdoors  there;  and 
no  one  ever  played  anything  but  dance-music  on 
the  Tyler  piano.  Alicia  Janes  looked  romantic 
under  the  yellow  light,  in  the  odor  of  flowers,  with 
the  background  of  green  leaves  about  her.  Her 
mother  had  more  than  a  local  reputation  as  a 
teacher  of  music,  and  the  melody  that  poured  out 
of  the  open  French  windows  of  the  parlor  was  elo- 

[276] 


SIR   WATSON   TYLER 


quent,  impassioned,  uplifting.  The  introductions 
were  made  in  a  low  voice,  so  as  not  to  disturb  the 
music,  and  it  was  in  silence  that  Alicia  put  out  a 
frank  hand  to  Wat  and  welcomed  him  with  the 
strong  grasp  of  a  violinist's  fingers. 

Wat's  ordinary  tongue-tied  diffidence  went  un- 
noticed under  these  circumstances.  He  was  able 
to  sit  down  without  saying  anything  confused  or 
banal.  The  powerful  music,  professionally  inter- 
preted, filled  him  with  stately  emotions,  to  which 
he  moved  and  sat  with  an  effect  of  personal  dignity 
and  repose. 

These  may  seem  to  be  details  of  small  importance. 
But  life  has  a  way  of  concealing  its  ominous  begin- 
nings and  of  being  striking  only  when  its  conclusions 
are  already  foregone.  So  death  is  more  dramatic, 
but  less  significant,  than  the  unperceived  incep- 
tion of  the  fatal  incidents  that  end  in  death.  And 
in  the  seemingly  trivial  circumstances  of  Wat's 
introduction  to  the  Janes  veranda  there  were  hid- 
den the  germs  of  vital  alterations  for  him — altera- 
tions that  were  to  affect  the  life  of  the  whole  com- 
munity of  Coulton,  and,  if  the  King's  birthday  list 
is  to  be  believed,  were  to  be  important  even  to  the 
British  Empire. 

Alicia  Janes  was  dressed  in  a  belted  black  gown, 
like  an  art  student,  with  a  starched  Eton  collar 
and  cuffs.  Instead  of  the  elaborate  coiffure  of  the 
day's  style  she  wore  her  dark  hair  simply  parted 
and  coiled  low  on  her  neck  in  a  Rossetti  mode.  Her 

[277] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


long  olive  face  would  have  been  homely  if  it  had  not 
been  for  her  eyes.  They  welcomed  Wat  with  the 
touching  smile  of  a  sensitive  independence,  and  he 
did  not  notice  that  her  lips  were  thin  and  her  teeth 
prominent.  In  dress  and  manner  she  was  unlike 
any  of  the  young  women  whom  he  had  met  in  the 
circle  of  his  sisters'  friends;  if  she  had  been  like 
them,  the  memory  of  past  embarrassments  would 
probably  have  inhibited  every  expression  of  his 
mind.  Her  surroundings  were  different  from  any 
to  which  he  had  been  accustomed;  and,  as  a  simple 
consequence,  he  was  quite  unlike  himself  in  .his  ac- 
customed surroundings.  Perhaps  it  was  the  music 
most  of  all  that  helped  him.  It  carried  him  as  a 
good  orchestra  might  carry  an  awkward  dancer, 
uplifted  into  a  sudden  confident  grace. 

When  she  asked  him  some  commonplace  ques- 
tions in  an  undertone  he  replied  naturally,  for- 
getting himself.  He  listened  to  the  music  and 
he  looked  at  her,  seriously  thrilled.  When  Webb 
asked  her  if  she  wouldn't  play  the  violin,  and  she 
replied  that  she  always  played  badly  before  stran- 
gers, Wat  begged  her  in  a  voice  of  genuine  anxiety 
not  to  consider  him  a  stranger.  She  said,  "I'll 
play  for  you  the  next  time  you  come."  And  he  was 
so  grateful  for  the  implied  invitation  to  come  again 
that  his  "Thank  you"  was  sincere  beyond  elo- 
quence. He  even  met  her  mother  without  embar- 
rassment, although  Mrs.  Janes  was  an  enigmatic- 
looking,  dark  woman  with  a  formidable  manner. 

[278] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


She  became  more  friendly  when  she  understood 
that  he  was  the  son  of  the  Tylers  of  Queen's  Avenue, 
and  he  felt  that  he  was  accepted  as  a  person  of  some 
importance,  like  herself.  That  was  pleasant. 

After  a  half-hour  on  the  veranda  he  went  on 
down-town  with  Webb,  as  calm  outwardly  as  if 
he  had  parted  from  old  friends,  and  so  deeply  happy 
in  the  prospect  of  seeing  her  again  that  he  was 
quite  unaware  of  what  had  happened  to  him.  The 
following  afternoon  he  telephoned  to  her  eagerly. 
And  he  was  back  with  her  that  night  for  hours  in 
the  lamplight,  among  the  vines — without  Webb- 
talking,  smiling,  and  listening  with  profound  delight 
while  she  played  the  violin  to  her  mother's  piano. 

And  there  was  an  incredible  difference  between 
Wat  on  the  veranda  and  Wat  at  home.  Under  his 
own  roof  he  was  a  large-headed,  heavy-shouldered, 
apparently  slow-witted,  shy  youth,  who  read  in  his 
room,  exercised  alone  in  a  gymnasium  which  he 
had  put  in  his  attic  during  a  college  vacation,  wrote 
long  letters  to  former  classmates  in  other  cities, 
and,  going  out  to  the  post-box,  mooned  ponderously 
around  the  streets  till  all  hours.  He  had  never  any- 
thing much  to  say.  Although  he  never  met  any 
one  if  he  could  avoid  it,  and  suffered  horribly  in  a 
drawing-room,  he  was — like  most  shy  men — par- 
ticular to  the  point  of  effeminacy  about  his  appear- 
ance. He  bathed  and  shaved  and  brushed  his  hair 
and  fussed  over  his  clothes  absurdly,  morning  and 
night.  He  was,  in  fact,  in  many  ways  ridiculous. 

19  [279] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


On  the  Janes  veranda  he  was  nothing  of  the  sort. 
As  the  son  of  the  owner  of  the  Coulton  street-car 
line  and  the  Tyler  real  estate,  he  was  a  young  man 
of  social  importance  in  a  home  where  the  mother 
earned  a  living  by  teaching  music  and  the  daughter 
had  only  the  prospect  of  doing  the  same.  He  was 
a  man  of  the  practical  world,  whose  opinions  were 
authoritative.  He  was  well  dressed  and  rather  dis- 
tinguished-looking, with  what  has  since  been  called 
"a  brooding  forehead."  He  was  fond  of  reading, 
and  he  had  the  solid  knowledge  of  a  slow  student 
who  assimilated  what  he  read.  Alicia  deferred  to 
him  with  an  inspiring  trust  in  his  wisdom  and  his 
experience.  She  deferred  even  to  his  judgment  in 
music — for  which,  it  transpired,  he  had  an  acute 
ear  and  a  fresh  appreciation.  She  played  to  him 
as  eagerly  as  a  painter  might  show  his  sketches  to 
a  wealthy  enthusiast  who  was  by  way  of  becoming  a 
collector.  Their  evenings  together  were  full  of  in- 
terest, of  promise,  of  talk  and  laughter,  of  serious 
converse  and  melodic  emotion. 

There  was  in  those  days,  in  Coulton,  no  place 
of  summer  amusement  to  which  a  young  pair  could 
make  an  excuse  of  going  in  order  to  be  together, 
so  that  Wat  was  never  called  on  to  make  a  public 
parade  of  his  devotion.  The  best  that  he  could  do 
was  to  take  AMcia  to  her  church.  But  it  was  not 
his  church.  He  was  not  known  there.  Mrs.  Janes 
was  the  church  organist;  Alicia  often  added  the 
music  of  her  violin;  and  she  sat  always  in  the 

[280] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


choir.  Wat,  in  a  back  pew  down-stairs,  was  incon- 
spicuous and  not  coupled  with  her.  It  was  for 
these  reasons  that  his  interest  in  Miss  Janes  was 
not  at  once  generally  known.  That  was  entirely 
accidental. 

But  it  was  not  an  accident  that  he  did  not  make 
it  known  to  his  family.  At  first  he  foresaw  and 
dreaded  only  the  amusement  of  his  sisters.  Wat 
"girling"!  What  next!  And  then  he  shrank  from 
the  effect  on  Alicia  Janes  of  getting  the  family 
point  of  view  on  him.  It  was  almost  as  if  he  had 
been  romanticizing  about  himself  and  knew  that 
his  family  would  tell  her  the  truth.  And  finally, 
as  guilty  as  if  he  were  leading  a  double  life,  he  con- 
fronted the  problem  that  haunts  all  double  lives — 
the  problem  of  either  keeping  them  apart  or  of 
uniting  them  in  any  harmony.  As  long  as  his 
family  had  been  at  "Surf holm"  it  had  not  been 
necessary  that  they  should  recognize  Miss  Janes, 
but,  now  that  they  were  back  in  town,  every  day 
that  they  ignored  her  was  an  insult  to  her  and  an 
accusation  of  him. 

He  had  to  tell  them.  He  had  to  put  into  words 
the  beautiful  secret  of  his  feeling  for  her.  "That 
freak!"  He  had  to  introduce  Alicia  to  his  home  and 
to  the  shame  of  his  belittlement  hi  his  home,  and 
let  his  contemptuous  sisters  disillusion  her  about 
him. 

A  horrible  situation!  Believe  me  or  not,  of  a 
career  so  distinguished  as  Sir  Watson's  this  was  the 

[281] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


most  crucial  point,  the  most  agonized  moment.  It 
is  not  even  hinted  at  in  the  official  accounts  of  his 
career,  yet  never  in  his  life  afterward  was  he  to  be 
so  racked  with  emotion,  so  terrified  by  the  real 
danger  of  losing  everything  in  the  world  that  could 
make  the  world  worth  living  in.  And  never  after- 
ward was  he  forced  to  choose  a  course  that  meant 
so  much  not  only  to  himself,  but  to  the  world  in 
which  he  lived. 


That  is  why  I  have  chosen  this  autumn  Sunday 
of  1892  as  the  most  notable  day  to  scrutinize  and 
chronicle  in  a  character-study  of  Sir  Watson  Tyler. 
I  should  like  to  commemorate  every  moment  of 
it,  but,  as  the  memoir-writers  say — when  their 
material  is  running  short — space  forbids.  You  will 
have  to  imagine  him  trying  to  dress  in  order  to  take 
Miss  Janes  to  church:  struggling  through  a  per- 
spiring ecstasy  of  irresolution  in  the  choice  of  a 
necktie,  straining  into  a  Sunday  coat  that  made 
him  look  round-shouldered  because  of  the  bulging 
muscularity  of  his  back,  cursing  his  tailor,  hating 
his  hands  because  they  hung  red  and  bloated  below 
his  cuffs,  hating  his  face,  his  moon  face,  his  round 
eyes,  his  pudding  of  a  forehead,  and  all  those  bodily 
characteristics  that  were  to  mark  him,  to  his  later 
biographers,  as  a  born  leader  among  men,  "physi- 
cally as  well  as  mentally  dominant." 

He  never  went  to  church,  to  his  family's  knowl- 

[282] 


SIR    WATSON   TYLER 


edge,  so  he  had  to  wait  until  they  had  gone  in  order 
to  avoid  inconvenient  questions.  They  were  always 
late.  He  watched  them,  behind  the  curtains  of 
his  window,  till  they  rounded  the  circular  driveway 
and  reached  the  street.  Five  minutes  later  he  was 
cutting  across  the  lawn,  scowling  under  a  high  hat 
that  always  pinched  his  forehead,  on  his  way  to  the 
Janeses'. 

He  did  not  arrive  there.  He  decided  that  he  was 
too  late.  He  decided  he  could  not  arrive  there  with- 
out having  first  made  up  his  mind  what  to  do.  And 
he  turned  aside  to  wander  through  the  residential 
streets  of  Coulton,  pursued  by  the  taunts  of  the 
church-bells.  He  came  to  the  weed-grown  vacant 
lots  and  the  withered  fields  of  market-gardeners 
in  a  northern  suburb  that  was  yet  to  be  nicknamed 
"Tylertown."  He  ended  beside  Smith's  Falls,  where 
the  Coulton  River  drops  twenty  feet  over  a  ridge 
into  the  Coulton  Valley;  and  he  sat  down  on  a  rock, 
in  his  high  hat,  on  the  site  of  the  present  power- 
house— his  power-house — that  has  put  the  light  and 
heat  of  industrial  life  into  the  whole  community. 
He  resolved  to  see  his  mother  privately,  tell  her 
the  truth,  get  her  to  help  him  with  his  father,  and 
let  his  sisters  do  their  worst. 

But  it  was  not  easy  to  see  Mrs.  Tyler  privately 
in  her  home  on  Sunday.  They  had  a  long  and 
solemn  noon  dinner  that  was  part  of  the  ritual  of 
the  day,  and  after  dinner  she  always  sat  with  her 
husband  and  her  daughters  in  the  sitting-room  up- 

[283] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


stairs,  indulging  her  domestic  soul  in  the  peace  of 
a  family  reunion  that  seemed  only  possible  to  the 
Tylers  on  Sunday  afternoon  when  they  were  gorged 
like  a  household  of  pythons.  Wat  retired  to  his 
bedroom.  Every  twenty  minutes  he  wandered 
down-stairs,  passed  the  door  of  the  sitting-room 
slowly,  and  returned  up  the  back  stairs  by  stealth. 
They  heard  him  pacing  the  floor  overhead.  Millie 
listened  to  him  thoughtfully.  The  younger  sister, 
Ollie,  was  trying  to  write  letters  on  note-paper  of 
robin 's-egg  blue,  and  she  blamed  him  for  all  the 
difficulties  of  composition;  it  was  so  distracting 
to  have  him  paddling  around  like  that.  Finally, 
when  his  mother  heard  him  creaking  down  the  stairs 
for  the  fourth  time,  she  called  out:  "Wat!  What 
is  the  matter  with  you?  If  you're  restless,  why 
don't  you  go  for  a  walk?" 

He  answered,  hastily,  "I'm  going,"  and  con- 
tinued down  to  the  lower  hall.  Millie  waited  to 
hear  the  front  door  shut  behind  him.  She  had  just 
remembered  what  he  said  at  breakfast  about  Jack 
Webb  taking  him  to  see  the  Janes  girl.  She  went 
at  once  to  the  library  to  telephone. 

And  she  came  flying  back  with  the  news  that 
while  they  had  been  away  Wat  had  been  spending 
almost  every  evening  with  Lizzie  Janes;  that  he  had 
been  going  to  see  her  since  their  return;  that  Jack 
Webb  thought  they  were  engaged.  "And  the  first 
thing  we  know,"  she  said,  "he'll  be  married  to 
her." 

[284] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


Mr.  Tyler  tilted  one  eyebrow.  He  thought  he 
understood  that  there  were  things  that  were  not 
in  Wat. 

"Well,  what's  the  matter  with  him,  then?" 
Millie  demanded.  "Why  has  he  been  hiding  it, 
and  sneaking  off  to  see  her  and  never  saying  a 
word  about  it,  if  he  isn't  ashamed  of  it  and 
afraid  to  tell  us?  They've  roped  him  in.  That's 
what  /  think.  Lizzie  Janes  is  a  regular  old  maid 
now.  If  she  isn't  engaged  to  Wat,  she  intends 
to  be.  No  one  else  would  ever  marry  her.  I  bet 
they've  been  working  Wat  for  all  they're  worth. 
They're  as  poor — " 

Her  father  continued  incredulous. 

"Well,"  she  cried,  "Jack  Webb  says  Wat's  been 
going  to  church  with  her  twice  a  Sunday." 

Wat's  indolent  aversion  to  church-going  being 
well  known,  this  was  the  most  damning  piece  of 
evidence  she  could  have  produced  against  him. 

Mrs.  Tyler  pleaded,  "She  can't  be  a  bad  girl 
if  she  goes  to  church  twice  a— 

"WTiat  difference  does  that  make?"  Millie  de- 
manded. "It  doesn't  make  it  any  better  for  us, 
does  it?" 

"I'll  speak  to  Wat,"  Mrs.  Tyler  promised,  feebly. 

"It's  no  use  speaking  to  Wat!  He  has  nothing 
to  do  with  it.  Any  one  can  turn  Wat  around  a  little 
finger." 

"Do  you  know  her?"  Mr.  Tyler  asked. 

"I  used  to  know  her — before  she  went  to — when 

[285] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


she  was  at  school  here.  She  used  to  wear  thick 
stockings,  and  woolen  mitts." 

Ollie  added,  as  the  final  word  of  condemnation, 
"Home-made!" 

Mr.  Tyler  may  have  felt  that  he  did  not  appreci- 
ate the  merit  of  these  facts.  He  made  a  judicial 
noise  in  his  throat  and  said  nothing. 

"She's  older  than  any  of  us — than  Wat,  too." 

"Well,"  he  said,  reaching  for  his  newspaper, 
"I  suppose  Wat  '11  do  what  he  likes.  He's  not 
likely  to  do  anything  remarkable  one  way  or  the 
other." 

"He's  not  going  to  marry  Lizzie  Janes,"  Millie 
declared.  "Not  if  /  can  help  it." 

"Millie,"  her  mother  scolded,  "you've  no  right 
interfering  in  Wat's  affairs.  He's  older  than  you 
are—" 

"It  isn't  only  Wat's  affair,"  she  cried.  "She 
isn't  only  going  to  marry  Wat.  We're  thrown  in 
with  the  bargain.  I  guess  we  have  something 
to  say." 

"  Tom !"  Mrs.  Tyler  protested.  "If  you  let  her—" 

"Well,"  he  ruled,  "Wat  hasn't  even  taken  the 
trouble  to  ask  us  what  we  thought  about  it.  I  don't 
feel  called  on  to  help  him.  It  means  more  to  the 
girls  than  it  does  to  us,  in  any  case.  They'll  have 
to  put  up  with  her  for  the  rest  of  her  life." 

"I  guess  not!"  Millie  said,  confidently. 

"Now,  Millie!"  her  mother  threatened.  "If 
you—" 

f286l 


SIR    WATSON   TYLER 


"If  you  want  Lizzie  Janes  and  her  mother  in  this 
family,"  Millie  said,  "/  don't.  I  guess  it  won't  be 
hard  to  let  Wat  and  them  know  it,  either.  And  if 
you  won't,"  she  ended,  defiantly,  as  she  turned 
away,  "/  will!99 

She  went  out  and  Ollie  followed.  Mrs.  Tyler 
dropped  back  in  her  chair,  gazing  speechlessly  at 
her  husband.  He  caught  her  eye  as  he  turned  a 
page  of  his  paper.  "All  right,  now,"  he  said.  "Wait 
till  Wat  comes." 

They  waited.  Millie  did  not.  She  distrusted 
her  mother's  partiality  for  WTat,  and  she  distrusted 
her  father's  distaste  for  interfering  in  any  house- 
hold troubles.  She  trusted  herself  only,  assured 
that  if  Wat's  ridiculous  misalliance  was  to  be  pre- 
vented it  must  be  prevented  by  her;  and  she  felt 
that  it  could  be  easily  prevented,  because  it  was 
ridiculous,  because  Wat  was  ridiculous,  because 
Lizzie  Janes  was  absurd.  WThat  was  Wat's  secrecy 
in  the  affair  but  a  confession  that  he  was  ashamed 
of  it?  What  was  Lizzie  Janes's  sly  silence  but  an 
evidence  that  she  had  hoped  to  hook  Wat  before 
his  family  knew  what  was  going  on? 

What  indeed?  She  asked  it  of  Ollie,  and  Ollie 
asked  it  of  her.  They  had  locked  themselves  in 
Millie's  bedroom  to  consult  together — Ollie  sitting, 
tailor- wise,  cross-legged  on  the  bed,  and  Millie 
gesticulating  up  and  down  the  room — in  one  of 
those  angry  councils  of  war  against  their  elders 
in  which  they  were  accustomed  to  face  the  cynical 

[287] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


facts  of  life  with,  a  frankness  that  would  have 
amazed  mankind. 

4 

And  Wat,  meantime,  arrived  at  the  door  of  the 
Janes  house  because  it  was  impossible  for  him  not 
to  arrive  there.  Alicia  greeted  him  with  her  usual 
unchanging,  gentle  smile.  He  began  to  explain  why 
he  had  not  come  that  morning  to  take  her  to  church; 
that  his  family — 

"There's  some  one  here,"  she  said,  unheeding. 
"Some  one  who  wants  to  meet  you.  My  brother!" 
And  touching  him  lightly  on  the  shoulder,  she 
turned  him  toward  the  parlor  and  ushered  him  in 
to  meet  his  future  in  the  shape  of  Howard  Janes. 

Janes  was  then  a  tall,  gaunt,  feverish-eyed,  dark 
enthusiast,  of  an  extraordinary  mental  and  physical 
restlessness — a  man  who  should  have  been  a  vision- 
ary, but  had  become  an  electrical  engineer.  He 
had  been  working  on  the  project  to  develop  elec- 
trical power  at  Niagara  Falls,  and  in  ten  minutes 
he  was  describing  to  Wat  the  whole  theory  and 
progress  of  the  work,  past,  present,  and  future. 
"In  ten  years,"  he  said,  "Niagara  power  will  be 
shot  all  through  this  district  for  a  hundred  miles 
around,  and  here's  Coulton  asleep,  with  one  of 
the  best  power  projects  hi  Canada  right  under  its 
nose.  Where?  Smith's  Falls.  And  here  you  are, 
with  a  dead  town,  a  dead  street-car  line,  a  lot  of 
dead  real  estate,  and  the  power  to  make  the  whole 

[288] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


thing  a  gold-mine  running  to  waste  over  that  hill. 
Why,  man,  if  it  was  an  oil-field  you'd  be  developing 
it  like  mad.  Because  it's  electricity  no  one  seems  to 
see  it.  And  in  ten  years  it  will  be  too  late." 

He  talked  to  Wat  as  if  Wat  owned  the  car  line, 
the  real  estate,  the  town  itself,  and  when  Wat 
glanced  at  Alicia  she  was  looking  at  him  as  if  he 
owned  them.  The  power  of  that  look  was  irresist- 
ible— hypnotic.  He  began  to  listen  as  if  he  owned 
the  car  lines  and  the  real  estate,  to  think  as  if 
he  owned  them,  to  ask  questions,  and  finally  to 
reply  as  if  he  owned  them.  Very  grave,  with  his 
eyes  narrowed,  silent,  he  became  a  transportation 
magnate  considering  a  development  scheme  pro- 
posed by  an  industrial  promoter. 

They  were  interrupted  by  the  telephone  in  the 
hall.  Alicia  answered  it.  "It's  for  you,"  she 
said  to  Wat,  looking  at  him  significantly.  "Your 
sister." 

He  went  to  the  'phone,  puzzled.  It  was  Millie's 
voice.  "You're  to  come  home  at  once,"  she 
said. 

Wat  asked,  "What's  the  matter?" 

"You  know  what's  the  matter,"  she  snapped, 
"as  well  as  I  do.  You're  wanted  home  here  at 
once."  And  while  the  meaning  of  that  was  slowly 
reaching  him,  through  the  preoccupied  brain  of  the 
railroad  magnate,  she  added,  "I  don't  wonder  you 
were  ashamed  to  tell  us!"  and  slapped  up  the 
receiver. 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  stood  a  moment  at  the  'phone,  pale.  And  in 
that  moment  history  was  made.  He  went  back  to 
Alicia,  face  front,  head  up.  She  looked  at  him  ex- 
pectantly. "They  want  me  to  bring  you  to  see 
them,"  he  said. 

It  was  what  she  had  expected,  he  supposed. 
Mark  it  as  the  beginning  of  his  great  career.  What 
she  expected!  There's  the  point.  That's  the  secret, 
as  I  see  it,  of  the  making  of  Sir  Watson  Tyler. 

After  a  moment's  hesitation  she  went  to  put  on 
her  hat.  He  said  to  her  brother:  "Can  you  wait 
till  we  get  back?  We'll  be  only  a  few  minutes.  I 
want  to  go  into  this  thing  with  you  in  detail." 
And  when  he  was  on  the  street  with  her  he  ex- 
plained, merely:  "I  want  you  to  meet  mother. 
I  don't  suppose  we'll  see  dad.  He's  always  so 
busy  he  doesn't  pay  much  attention  to  what  goes 
on  at  home." 

"I  don't  think  I've  ever  seen  any  of  your  family," 
she  said,  "except  your  sisters."  She  was  thinkLig 
of  them  as  she  used  to  see  them  in  their  school- 
days, in  short  dresses,  giggling,  and  chewing  candy 
in  the  street-cars. 

"They're  very  young,"  Wat  warned  her,  "and 
they've  been  spoiled.  You  mustn't  mind  if  Millie — 
She's  been  allowed  to  do  pretty  much  as  she  likes. 
Our  life  at  home  isn't  like  yours,  you  know.  I 
think  our  house  is  too  big.  We  seem  to  be — sort 
of  separated  in  our  rooms." 

Strange!    He  appeared  apologetic.     She  did  not 

[290] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


understand  why — unless  it  was  that  he  was  fearful 
of  her  criticism  of  his  family.  She  knew  that  they 
were  not  socially  distinguished,  except  by  news- 
paper notice;  but  she  thought  she  had  no  reverence 
for  social  position.  And  he  could  hardly  be  apolo- 
gizing for  their  income. 


The  house,  as  they  approached  it,  was  preten- 
tious, but  that  was  probably  the  architect's  fault. 
It  was  modestly  withdrawn  behind  its  trees,  its 
flower-beds,  and  its  lawns.  For  a  moment  she  saw 
herself,  in  her  simple  costume,  coming  to  be  passed 
upon  by  the  eyes  of  an  alien  wealth.  Wat  was 
silent,  occupied  with  his  own  thoughts.  He  rang 
absent-mindedly. 

A  maid  opened  a  door  on  a  hall  that  was  archi- 
tecturally stuffy  and  not  furnished  in  the  rich  sim- 
plicity that  Alicia  had  expected.  And  the  sight  of  the 
drawing-room  was  a  shock.  It  was  overcrowded 
with  pink-upholstered  shell-shaped  furniture  that 
gave  her  a  note  of  overdressed  bad  taste.  The 
carpet  was  as  richly  gaudy  as  a  hand-painted  satin 
pincushion.  The  bric-a-brac,  of  a  florid  costliness, 
cluttered  the  mantelpieces  and  the  table-tops  like 
a  tradesman's  display.  The  pictures  on  the  walls 
were  the  family  photographs  and  steel  engravings 
of  an  earlier  home.  It  was  a  room  of  undigested 
dividends,  and  she  thought  that  she  began  to  see 
why  Wat  had  been  apologetic.  To  his  credit  he 

[291] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


seemed  uncomfortable  in  it.  "I'll  just  tell  them 
you're  here,"  he  said. 

He  left  her  there  and  went  out  to  the  stairs. 
Millie  was  coming  down  to  see  who  had  rung. 
"Well,"  she  cried  from  a  landing  above  him  as  he 
ascended  resolutely,  "will  you  tell  us  what  you 
think  you're  doing  with  that  Lizzie  Janes?" 

He  caught  her  by  the  arm.  He  said  in  a  voice 
that  was  new  to  her:  "I've  brought  her  to  call  on 
mother.  Tell  her  she's  here." 

"You've  brought  her  to — !  I'll  do  nothing  of 
the  kind.  You  can  just  take  her  away  again.  / 
don't  want  her,  and  they  don't  want  her."  She  had 
begun  to  raise  her  voice,  with  the  evident  intention 
of  letting  any  one  hear  who  would.  "If  she  thinks 
she  can — " 

"That's  enough!"  He  stopped  her  angrily,  with 
his  hand  over  her  mouth.  "You  ought  to  be — 

She  struggled  with  him,  striking  his  hand 
away.  "How  dare  you!  If  you  think  that  Lizzie 
Janes — " 

He  was  afraid  that  Alicia  might  hear  it.  He 
grabbed  her  up  roughly  and  began  to  carry  her  up- 
stairs, fighting  with  him,  furious  at  the  indignity — 
for  he  had  caught  her  where  he  could,  with  no  re- 
spect for  her  body  or  her  clothes.  No  one,  in  years, 
had  dared  to  lay  hands  on  her,  no  matter  what  she 
did;  the  sanctity  of  her  fastidious  young  person 
was  an  inviolable  right  to  her;  and  Wat's  assault 
upon  it  was  brutal  to  her,  degrading,  atrocious. 

[292] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


She  became  hysterical,  in  a  clawed  and  tousled 
passion  of  shame  and  resentment.  He  carried  her 
to  her  room,  tossed  her  on  to  her  bed,  and  left  her, 
face  down  on  her  pillows,  sobbing,  outraged.  She 
could  have  killed  him — or  herself. 

He  straightened  his  necktie  and  strode  into  the 
sitting-room. 

"Why,  Wat!"  his  mother  cried.  "What's  the 
matter?" 

"Miss  Janes,"  he  said,  "is  down-stairs.  I've 
brought  her  to  call  on  you." 

She  rose,  staring.  His  father  looked  at  him, 
surprised,  over  the  top  of  his  paper.  "Well,"  he 
demanded,  "what's  all  this  about  Miss  Janes, 
anyway?" 

Wat  gave  him  back  his  look  defiantly.  "She's 
the  finest  girl  I've  ever  met.  And  I'm  going  to 
marry  her,  if  I  can." 

"Oh,"  Mr.  Tyler  said,  and  returned  to  his  news. 

Ollie  rushed  out  to  find  her  sister. 

Wat  turned  his  amazing  countenance  on  his 
mother. 

"Yes,  Wat,"  she  replied  to  it — and  went  with 
him  obediently. 

6 

Of  the  interview  that  followed  in  the  drawing- 
room  there  were  several  conflicting  reports  made. 
Ollie  slipped  down  quietly  to  hear  the  end  of  it — 
after  a  stupefying  account  from  Millie  of  what  had 

[293] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


happened — but  her  report  to  Millie  is  negligible. 
From  that  night  both  the  girls  ceased  to  exist  as 
factors  in  Wat's  life;  he  saw  them  and  heard  them 
thereafter  only  absent-mindedly. 

Mrs.  Tyler's  report  was  made  in  voluble  excite- 
ment to  her  husband,  who  listened,  frowning,  over 
his  cigar.  "And,  Tom,  you  wouldn't  have  known 
him,"  she  said.  "He  wasn't  like — like  himself  at 
all !  It  was  so  pretty.  They're  so  in  love  with  each 
other.  She's  such  a  sweet  girl." 

"Well,"  he  grumbled,  "I'll  have  nothing  to  do 
with  it.  It's  in  your  department.  If  it  was  one  of 
the  girls  it  'd  be  different.  I  suppose  Wat  '11  have 
to  do  his  own  marrying.  He's  old  enough.  I  hope 
she'll  make  a  man  of  him." 

"'A  man  of  him'!  She!  Why,  she's  as —  No, 
indeed!  You  ought  to  see  the  way  she  defers 
to  him.  She's  as  proud  of  him!  And  he's  as 
different!" 

He  was  unconvinced.  "  I'm  glad  to  hear  it.  You'd 
better  go  and  look  after  Millie.  She  accuses  him  of 
assault  and  battery." 

"It  serves  her  right.  I'll  not  go  near  her.  And, 
Tom,"  she  said,  "he  wants  to  talk  to  you  about 
a  plan  he  has  for  the  railway — for  using  electric 
light  to  run  it,  or  something  like  that." 

"Huh!    Who  put  that  in  his  head?" 

"Oh,  he  made  it  up  himself.  Her  brother's 
an  engineer,  and  they've  been  talking  about 
it." 

[294] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


"I  suppose!"  he  said.  "She'll  be  working  the 
whole  Janes  family  in  on  us."  He  snorted.  "I'm 
glad  some  one's  put  something  into  his  head  besides 
eating  and  sleeping." 

"Now,  Tom,"  she  pleaded,  "you've  got  to  be 
fair  to  Wat!" 

•'All  right,  Mary,"  he  relented.  "Run  along  and 
see  Millie.  I've  had  enough  for  one  Sunday." 

As  for  Alicia  Janes,  it  was  late  at  night  when 
she  made  her  report  to  her  mother  in  a  subdued 
tremble  of  excitement.  She  had  overheard  some- 
thing of  Wat's  scuffle  with  Millie  on  the  stairway, 
but  she  did  not  speak  of  it  except  to  say:  "I'm 
afraid  the  girls  are  awful.  The  youngest,  Ollie, 
is  overdressed  and  silly — with  the  manners  of  a 
spoiled  child  of  ten.  It's  her  mother's  fault.  She's 
one  of  those  helpless  big  women.  Wat  must  have 
got  his  qualities  from  his  father." 

"Did  you  find  out  why  they  hadn't  called?" 

"No-o.    But  I  can  guess." 

"Yes?" 

"Well,  it  isn't  a  nice  thing  to  say,  but  I  really 
think  Wat's  rather — as  if  he  were  ashamed  of  them. 
And  I  don't  wonder,  mother!  Their  front  room's 
furnished  with  that—  Oh,  and  such  bric-a-brac!" 
She  paused.  She  hesitated.  She  blushed.  "Wat 
asked  me  if  I'd—  You  know  he  had  never  really 
spoken  before,  although  I  knew  he — 

Her  mother  said,  softly,  "Yes?" 

She  looked  down  at  the  worn  carpet.     "And  I 

20  [295] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


really  felt  so  sorry  for  him —    The  family's  awful, 
I  know,  but  he's  so —    I  said  I  would." 


She  had  said  she  would.  And  Wat,  long  after 
midnight,  lying  on  his  back  in  bed,  staring  up  at 
the  darkness,  felt  as  if  he  were  afloat  on  a  current 
that  was  carrying  him  away  from  his  old  life  with 
more  than  the  power  of  Niagara.  His  mind  was 
full  of  Howard  Janes's  plans  for  harnessing  Smith's 
Falls,  of  electrifying  the  street  railway,  of  lighting 
Coulton  with  electricity  and  turning  the  vacant 
Tyler  lots  of  the  northern  suburb  into  factory  sites. 
He  was  thinking  of  incorporations,  franchises, 
capitalizations,  stocks,  bonds,  mortgages,  and  loans. 
He  had  been  talking  them  over  with  Janes  for  hours 
on  the  veranda,  at  the  supper-table,  on  the  street. 
There  had  been  no  music.  As  Wat  was  leaving  he 
had  spoken  to  Alicia  hastily  in  the  hall — asking 
her  to  marry  him,  in  fact — and  she  had  said,  "Oh, 
Wat!"  clinging  to  his  hands  as  he  kissed  her.  He 
could  still  feel  that  tremulous,  confiding  grasp  of 
her  strong  fingers  as  she  surrendered  her  life  to 
him,  depending  on  him,  proud  of  him,  humble  to 
him.  He  shivered.  He  was  afraid. 

And  that  was  to  be  only  the  first  of  many  such 
frightened  midnights.  A  thousand  times  he  was  to 
ask  himself:  "What  am  I  doing?  WTiy  have  I 
gone  into  this  business?  It  'II  kill  me!  It  '11  worry 
me  to  death!"  He  had  gone  into  it  because  Alicia 

[296] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


had  expected  him  to;  but  he  did  not  know  it.    The 
maddest  thing  he  ever  did — 

It  was  when  the  power  scheme  had  been  success- 
fully floated,  the  street  railway  was  putting  out 
long  radial  lines  along  the  country  roads,  and  the 
gas  company  was  willing  to  sell  out  to  him  in  order 
to  escape  the  inevitable  clash  of  competition  with 
his  electric  light.  The  banks  suddenly  began  to 
make  trouble  about  carrying  him.  He  was  in  their 
debt  for  an  appalling  amount.  He  felt  that  he 
ought  to  prepare  his  wife  for  the  worst.  "Well, 
Wat,"  she  said,  reproachfully,  when  she  understood 
him,  "if  the  banks  are  going  to  bother  you,  I  don't 
see  why  you  don't  get  a  bank  of  your  own." 

It  was  as  if  she  thought  he  could  buy  a  bank  in  a 
toy-shop.  She  expected  it  of  him.  Miracles! 
nothing  but  miracles!  And  it  was  the  maddest 
thing  he  ever  did,  but  he  went  after  the  moribund 
Farmers'  Trust  Company,  got  it  with  his  father's 
assistance,  reorganized  it  and  put  it  on  its  feet, 
while  he  held  up  the  weak-kneed  power  projects 
and  Janes  talked  manufacturers  into  buying  power 
sites.  The  Mechanics'  Bank  of  Canada  passed  to 
him  later,  but  by  that  time  he  was  running,  at 
"Tylertown,"  an  automobile  factory,  a  stone- 
crusher,  a  carborundum  works,  and  the  plant  of 
Coulton's  famous  Eleco  Breakfast  Food,  cooked  by 
electricity,  and  the  success  of  the  whole  city  of 
Coulton  was  so  involved  with  his  fortunes  that  he 
simply  could  not  be  allowed  to  fail. 

[287] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


And  here  was  the  fact  that  made  the  whole  thing 
possible:  Janes  had  the  vision  and  the  daring  nec- 
essary to  attempt  their  undertakings,  but  he  could 
not  have  carried  them  out;  whereas  Wat  would 
never  have  gone  beyond  the  original  power-house; 
but  with  Janes  talking  to  him  and  Alicia  looking 
at  him  he  moved  ahead  with  a  stolid,  conservative 
caution  and  a  painstaking  care  of  detail  that  made 
every  move  as  safe  and  deliberate  as  a  glacial  ad- 
vance. He  worked  day  and  night,  methodically, 
with  a  ceaseless  application  that  would  have  worn 
out  a  less  solid  and  lethargic  man.  It  was  as  if, 
having  eaten  and  slept — and  nothing  else — for 
twenty  years,  he  could  do  as  he  pleased  about  food 
now,  and  never  rest  at  all.  He  was  wonderful. 
His  mind  digested  everything,  like  his  stomach, 
slowly,  but  without  distress.  His  shyness,  now 
deeply  concealed,  made  him  silent,  unfathomable. 
He  had  no  friends,  because  he  confided  in  no  one; 
he  was  too  diffident  to  do  it.  Behind  his  inscrutable 
silence  he  studied  and  watched  the  men  with  whom 
he  had  to  work,  moving  like  a  quiet  engineer  among 
the  machinery  which  he  had  started,  and  the  uproar 
of  it.  And  the  moment  he  decided  that  a  man 
was  wrong  he  took  him  out  and  dropped  him  clean, 
without  feeling,  without  any  friendly  entanglement 
to  deter  him,  silently. 

He  had  to  go  into  politics  to  protect  his  franchises, 
and  he  became  the  "  Big  Business  Interests  "  behind 
the  local  campaign;  but  he  never  made  a  public 

[298] 


SIR   WATSON    TYLER 


appearance;  he  managed  campaign  funds,  sat  on 
executive  committees,  was  consulted  by  the  party 
leaders,  and  passed  upon  policies  and  candidates. 
The  Coulton  Advertiser  annoyed  him,  and  he  bought 
it.  His  wife  had  gathered  about  her  a  number  of 
music-lovers,  and  they  formed  a  stringed  orchestra 
that  studied  and  played  in  the  music-room  of  Wat's 
new  home  on  the  hill  above  "  Tylertown."  She  ex- 
pected him  to  be  present,  and  he  rarely  failed.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  he  seldom  heard  more  than  the 
first  few  bars  of  a  composition,  then,  emotionalized, 
his  brain  excited,  he  sat  planning,  reviewing,  ad- 
vancing, and  reconsidering  his  work.  Music  had 
that  effect  on  him.  It  enlivened  his  lumbering 
mind.  He  became  as  addicted  to  it  as  if  it  were 
alcohol. 

He  followed  his  wife  into  a  plan  for  the  formation 
of  a  symphony  orchestra,  which  he  endowed.  When 
there  was  no  proper  building  for  it  he  put  up  Mozart 
Hall  and  gave  it  to  the  city.  She  wanted  to  hear 
Beethoven's  Ninth  Symphony,  so  the  orchestra  had 
to  be  supplemented  with  a  choir.  He  endowed  the 
Coulton  Conservatory  of  Music  when  she  objected 
that  she  could  not  get  voices  or  musicians  because 
there  was  no  way  in  Coulton  to  educate  or  train 
them.  And  in  doing  these  things  he  gave  Coulton 
its  fame  as  a  musical  center.  (Lamplight  on  the 
veranda,  and  Mrs.  Janes  playing  the  piano  behind 
the  open  French  windows !) 

It   was   the  campaign   against  reciprocity   that 

[299] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


put  him  in  the  Senate.  He  believed  that  reciprocity 
with  the  United  States  would  ruin  his  factories.  He 
headed  the  committee  of  Canadian  manufacturers 
that  raised  the  funds  for  the  national  campaign 
against  the  measure.  The  consequent  defeat  of  the 
Liberal  party  put  his  friends  in  power.  They  re- 
warded him  with  a  Senatorship.  He  was  opposed 
to  taking  it,  but  his  wife  expected  him  to.  He  went 
into  the  Cabinet,  as  Minister  without  portfolio,  a 
year  later.  It  was  inevitable.  He  was  the  financial 
head  of  the  party;  they  had  to  have  him  at  their 
government  councils.  When  the  war  with  Germany 
broke  out  he  gave  full  pay  to  all  of  his  employ- 
ees that  volunteered.  He  endowed  a  battery  of 
machine-guns  from  Coulton.  Every  factory  that  he 
controlled  he  turned  into  a  munition-works.  He 
contributed  lavishly  to  the  Red  Cross.  And,  of 
course,  he  was  knighted. 

It  is  an  open  secret  that  he  will  probably  be  made 
Lord  Coulton  when  the  readjustment  of  the  colonial 
affairs  of  the  Empire  takes  him  to  London.  He  will 
be  influential  there;  he  has  the  silent,  conservative 
air  of  ponderous  authority  that  England  trusts. 
And  Lady  Tyler  is  a  poised,  gracious,  and  charming 
person  who  will  be  popular  socially.  She,  of  course, 
is  of  no  importance  to  the  Empire.  She  still  looks 
at  Wat  worshipfully,  without  any  suspicion  that 
it  was  she  who  made  him — not  the  slightest. 

I  do  not  know  how  much  of  the  old  Wat  is  left 
in  him.  His  silence  covers  him.  It  is  impossible 

[300] 


SIR    WATSON    TYLER 


to  tell  how  greatly  the  quality  and  texture  of  his 
mind  may  have  changed  under  the  exercise  and  labor 
of  his  gigantic  undertakings.  I  saw  him  when  he 
was  in  New  York  to  hear  the  Coulton  orchestra 
and  choir  give  the  Ninth  Symphony,  to  the  applause 
of  the  most  critical.  ("The  scion  of  a  noble  house," 
one  of  the  papers  called  him.)  And  it  certainly 
seemed  impossible — although  I  swear  I  believe  it  is 
true — that  the  solid  magnificences  of  the  man  and 
his  achievements  were  all  due  to  the  fact  that  when 
he  came  back  from  the  Janes  telephone  to  confront 
the  expectancy  of  Alicia  Janes,  on  that  Sunday 
night  in  1892,  he  said,  "They  want  me  to  bring 
you  to  see  them,"  instead  of  saying,  "They  want 
me  at  home." 


FROM  THE   LIFE 

District-Attorney  Wickson 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY  WICKSON 


WICKSON,  Arthur  John,  lawyer;  Mar. 
19,  1867-Aug.  25,  1912;  see  Vol.  VII 
(1912-13).— Who's  Who. 


TO  tell  the  truth,  I  did  not  at  any  time  know 
District-Attorney  Wickson  well  enough  to  be 
able  now  to  do  an  intimate  portrait-study  of  him 
at  first  hand.  But  I  know  his  town — having 
"muckraked"  it  while  he  was  in  office.  I  know 
many  of  the  circumstances  of  his  story,  because 
they  were  part  of  the  material  that  came  up  in  the 
raking.  And  I  know  a  number  of  his  closest  friends 
and  associates,  from  whom  I  have  gathered  the  in- 
cidents of  that  day  in  his  life  which  I  wish  to  record 
— the  great  and  culminating  day  of  his  career. 

The  men  whom  I  have  relied  upon  for  the  details 
of  that  day  are  "Jack"  Arnett,  sculptor  of  the 
Wickson  Memorial,  McPhee  Harris,  president  of 
the  Purity  Defense  League  and  the  local  Anti- 
Saloon  Association,  and  Tim  Collins  (or  "Cole" 
or  "Colburn"),  the  detective  who  helped  Wickson 
in  the  investigations  and  prosecutions  that  made 
the  District  Attorney  a  national  figure.  These 
three  men  were  the  chief  actors  in  the  dramatic 
crisis  of  Wickson's  life  and  in  those  crucial  incidents 

[805] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


which  seem  to  me  to  express  him  most  completely. 
Furthermore,  McPhee  Harris  had  been  associated 
with  him  for  years,  and  Jack  Arnett  was  a  boy- 
hood friend  who  knew  him  better,  probably,  than 
any  one  except  his  mother. 

I  have  met  his  mother,  but  I  have  never  had 
sufficient  reportorial  ruthlessness  to  ask  her  about 
him. 


Arnett  has  given  me  one  anecdote  of  Wickson's 
early  days  that  I  should  consider  vital  to  an  under- 
standing of  him.  "Wickson,"  he  says,  "left  home 
as  a  boy,  and  came  to  town  because  he  had  been 
beaten  by  his  father."  The  father  he  described  as 
a  petty  tyrant  who  ruled  his  poverty-stricken  family 
and  his  starved  farm  with  all  the  exacting  imperious- 
ness  of  incompetency  aggravated  by  indigestion. 
Arthur  Wickson  was  an  only  child.  He  went  one 
morning  to  his  mother  in  the  kitchen  and  blurted 
out  to  her  that  he  had  to  leave  home,  that  he 
couldn't  stand  it  any  longer.  "I  remember,"  he 
told  Arnett,  "how  she  was  washing  dishes,  and  when 
I  told  her  she  didn't  say  anything.  She  didn't 
even  look  at  me.  She  was  working  in  front  of  a 
window,  and  she  just  raised  her  eyes  from  the  dish- 
pan  and  stood  looking  out  of  that  window  as  if 
there  were  bars  across  it.  I  had  the  feeling  that  a 
convict  must  have  when  he  tells  his  cellmate  he 
has  a  chance  to  escape  and  can't  take  him  along. 

[306] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

"She  asked  me  what  I  was  going  to  do,  and  I 
told  her  I  was  going  to  be  a  lawyer.  I  don't  know 
where  I  got  that  ambition.  She  dried  her  hands 
on  her  apron  without  a  word,  and  went  up-stairs 
to  her  room,  and  when  she  came  down  she  had  two 
dollars  that  she'd  saved — I  don't  know  how.  God ! 
When  I  think  of  those  hands  and  those  two  dollars ! 

"I  didn't  want  to  take  them.  She  made  me.  I 
promised  her  I'd  pay  them  back,  and  I've  been 
trying  to  ever  since,  but  I  couldn't  do  it  with  a 
million. 

"Funny  thing.  She  kissed  me  sort  of  timidly, 
and  there  was  a  look  in  her  eyes  as  if  I  had  some 
resemblance  to  him  that  frightened  her.  You  know 
what  I  mean.  It  made  me  hate  him  so  that  when 
I  walked  off  down  the  road  and  he  shouted  at  me 
from  the  field  I  didn't  even  answer  him.  He  was 
plowing.  It  was  chilly,  and  the  steam  was  rising 
from  the  horses  as  they  stood  there  at  the  end  of 
a  furrow.  I  remember  yet  that  he  and  the  horses 
looked  small — like  little  figures  in  lead — and  I  felt 
that  he  was  a  stranger — that  I  didn't  know  who 
he  was.  Can  you  explain  that?" 

3 

I  consider  that  incident  illuminating  because  it 
really  explains  why  Wickson  became  a  reformer. 
Undoubtedly  he  transferred  to  the  governing  power 
of  society  the  feeling  that  he  had  against  his  father, 
the  governing  power  of  his  youth.  He  did  it,  of 

[307] 


FROM  THE    LIFE 


course,  unconsciously,  sympathizing  with  the  vic- 
tims of  social  injustice  as  he  had  sympathized  with 
his  mother  and  himself.  And  that,  I  believe,  is  the 
reason  why  he  "never  thought"  of  his  father  again. 

Moreover,  it  was  probably  his  early  revolt 
against  paternal  injustice  that  inspired  him  with 
the  ambition  to  be  a  lawyer  so  that  he  might  be 
able  to  defend  himself  and  others  against  wrongs, 
and  help  to  administer  justice  equitably. 

I  advance  the  theory  because  I  have  found  a 
similar  transference  in  many  other  reformers. 

4 

In  any  case  he  arrived  in  the  city  that  afternoon 
in  the  rain  and  set  about  finding  work.  It  was 
about  four  o'clock,  according  to  all  accounts,  when 
he  came  into  the  office  of  McPhee  Harris  and  asked 
if  they  needed  an  office-boy.  No  one  pretends 
to  know  what  attracted  him  to  that  particular  door, 
but  I  venture  to  suggest  that  it  was  because  of  the 
word  "Defense"  in  the  sign,  "Purity  Defense 
League."  Harris  was  then  counsel  for  the  League. 
He  remembers  being  instantly  struck  by  the  boy's 
air  of  self-reliance.  "He  was  dripping  wet,"  Harris 
says,  "his  hair  was  in  his  eyes,  and  his  clothes 
were  pathetic.  But  he  stood  up  there  and  con- 
fronted me  like  a  young  David.  He  had  wonderful 
eyes — always.  I  couldn't  have  turned  him  away." 

Harris  employed  him,  and,  finding  that  he  had 
no  place  to  sleep,  Harris  sent  him  with  a  note  to 

[308] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  building,  where  they  put  him  in  a 
room  with  another  of  Harris's  protege's.  And  this 
second  protege"  was  Jack  Arnett,  the  sculptor  of 
the  Wickson  Memorial,  then  a  young  waif  who  had 
come  into  the  hands  of  the  Purity  Defense  League 
because  he  had  been  hanging  around  barrooms, 
making  a  living  by  drawing  caricatures  of  celebri- 
ties in  the  sawdust  on  barroom  floors.  Harris  was 
supporting  him  and  paying  his  tuition  in  the  local 
art-school. 

"I  remember,'*  Arnett  says,  "that  before  Wick- 
son  went  to  bed  that  night  he  sat  down  and  wrote 
a  letter  to  his  mother  and  sent  her  back  one  of  her 
own  dollars  on  account." 


Wickson  proved  to  have  a  brain  as  hardy  as  his 
body.  He  worked  and  studied  methodically,  thor- 
oughly, and  without  the  effort  of  a  frown.  He  be- 
came chief  clerk  of  McPhee  Harris's  office  by 
virtue  of  a  mechanical  efficiency  that  was  the  first 
expression  of  his  basic  integrity  of  mind.  On  that 
efficiency  Harris  came  more  and  more  to  rely. 
Wickson  shared  in  Harris's  prosecutions  of  the 
venders  of  "picture  post-cards,"  the  proprietors  of 
"nickelodeons,"  and  the  managers  of  "variety 
shows"  who  offended  against  the  League's  stand- 
ards of  public  purity.  Arnett,  having  an  artist's 
views  of  nudity,  often  quarreled  with  Wickson 
about  these  prosecutions. 

[309] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


"He  wasn't  morbid,  as  McPhee  Harris  was,9' 
Arnett  says.  "He  did  it  to  protect  young  people 
from  contamination.  Harris  did  it  because  he  was 
rotten  himself — that's  my  idea,  anyway — and  his 
inward  struggle  with  himself  made  him  a  crazy 
fanatic.  He  could  see  something  nasty  in  any — 
in  any  naked  innocence." 

As  McPhee  Harris's  junior  partner,  Wickson 
himself  conducted  some  of  the  Purity  Defense 
League's  later  cases  against  saloon-keepers  and  the 
owners  of  "dives."  And  when  Harris  became  presi- 
dent of  the  local  "Drys"  Wickson  succeeded  him 
as  attorney  for  the  League,  and  so  came  to  prose- 
cute the  "white-slave"  cases  that  first  made  him 
notorious.  His  election  to  the  office  of  District 
Attorney  followed  unexpectedly.  He  was  carried 
into  power  on  a  reform  wave  that  was  blown  up  by 
a  violent  agitation  against  the  "red-light  district." 

It  was  as  District  Attorney  that  his  real  career 
began — and  his  real  difficulties.  Both  culmi- 
nated together  on  the  day  whose  incidents  I  wish  to 
give.  McPhee  Harris  has  his  own  account  of  those 
incidents.  Jack  Arnett  has  another.  And  I  have 
coaxed  a  third  out  of  the  detective,  Tim  Collins. 
Putting  the  three  together,  it  is  easy  to  reconstruct 
a  dramatic  story  of  the  day. 

6 

It  began  in  an  interview  with  McPhee  Harris, 
who  came  smiling  into  the  District  Attorney's 

[310] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

office  soon  after  Wickson  arrived  there  for  his 
morning's  work.  "Just  a  moment,  Arthur,"  he 
apologized  for  taking  Wickson's  time,  and  Wickson 
shook  hands  with  him  without  replying. 

McPhee  Harris  has  a  smile  that  at  its  most 
perfunctory  moments  is  something  more  than 
polite.  It  is  the  smile  of  austerity  made  benevolent 
by  the  conscientious  sympathy  of  a  professing  Chris- 
tian. His  chin,  clean-shaven  between  gray  side- 
whiskers,  repeats  the  bony  conformation  of  his 
narrow  skull,  which  is  bald  between  two  bushes 
of  gray  hair.  He  is  one  of  the  few  men  left  in 
America  who  still  wear  on  all  occasions  the  tall 
silk  hat. 

He  said  to  Wickson,  "I  had  a  visit  last  night 
from  friend  Toole."  And  Toole  being  a  corrupt 
machine  politician,  the  "friend"  was  said  sarcas- 
tically, of  course. 

Wickson  leaned  forward  on  his  table-desk  in- 
tently. 

"We  have  put  the  fear  of  God  into  them,"  Harris 
assured  him.  "They  are  prepared  to  nominate  a 
ticket  of  good  men." 

Wickson  waited,  watching  him,  silent.  (Harris 
remembers  that  silence  well — as  a  justification.) 

"We  are  to  name  them,"  he  went  on,  "practically 
all.  They  reserve  a  few  of  the  minor  offices — as,  for 
instance,  the  sheriff  and  the  county  clerk  and 
recorder." 

"If  they  nominate  those  three  officers,"  Wickson 

21  [311] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


said,  in  his  high,  unpleasant  voice,  "they'll  have 
control  of  the  local  machinery  of  elections." 

"Perhaps  so,"  Harris  conceded,  amiably.  "It's 
difficult  to  get  everything  at  once.  They'll  accept 
our  nominee  for  the  Supreme  Court." 

"Because  they  control  the  rest  of  the  bench," 
said  Wickson. 

"Still,"  Harris  pointed  out,  "we  must  begin 
somewhere — and  one  is  a  beginning.  We're  also 
to  have  the  coroner,  two  of  the  county  commis- 
sioners, some  of  the  members  of  the  Legislature, 
some  Senators,  and  some  of  the  state  officers.  The 
details  aren't  decided.  It's  for  us  to  decide — largely. 
They're  very  conciliatory." 

Wickson  asked,  at  last,  "And  who  nominates  the 
district  attorney?" 

Harris  replied,  "We  do." 

But  he  replied  with  a  look  that  was  somewhat 
too  steady — with  a  look  that  was  rather  self- 
consciously defiant. 

The  District  Attorney  had  come  to  know  McPhee 
Harris  as  "a  man  of  indecisive  character  and  small 
mind,  strengthened  and  enlarged  by  the  sense  of 
a  divine  power  relying  on  him  as  its  instrument." 
There  was  in  Harris's  eyes,  now,  the  glint  of  that 
resolute  instrumentality.  Wickson's  scrutiny  probed 
and  questioned  him. 

"They  don't  think,"  Harris  admitted,  "that  we 
can  re-elect  you.  They  believe  you've  made  too 
many  enemies." 

[312] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

That  was  "the  nigger  in  the  woodpile,"  as  Wick- 
son  would  have  said.  And  having  uncovered  it,  he 
nodded  and  rose. 

He  began  to  walk  thoughtfully  up  and  down  his 
office,  ignoring  McPhee  Harris,  as  if,  having  dis- 
covered "what  was  up,'*  he  had  turned  to  concen- 
trate on  that  instead  of  the  familiar  face  behind 
which  the  secret  had  been  concealed. 

7 

Wickson  had  been  carried  into  office,  as  I  have 
said,  by  an  agitation  against  the  red-light  district. 
And  as  long  as  he  had  devoted  his  office  to  a  cru- 
sade against  vice  he  had  been  backed  by  the  Purity 
League,  by  McPhee  Harris,  by  the  Federation  of 
Women's  Clubs,  by  the  church-goers  and  all  the  good 
people  of  the  town.  But  he  had  found  vice  pro- 
tected by  both  the  political  organizations,  and 
when  he  attacked  them  he  found  them  protected 
by  the  rich  men  of  the  community  who  owned  the 
public-utility  monopolies  that  had  been  voted  to 
them  by  the  politicians.  He  had  made  enemies 
not  only  in  the  dive  district,  but  among  the  best 
citizens  "on  the  Hill."  He  had  been  accused  of 
"attacking  vested  interests"  and  of  "stirring  up 
class  hatreds."  He  had  offended  some  of  the  most 
generous  contributors  to  the  funds  of  the  Purity 
Defense  League.  He  had  offended  McPhee  Harris. 

Hence  the  silence  with  which  he  had  listened  to 
Harris  and  the  suspicion  with  which  he  had  scru- 

[S13J 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


tinized  him.  Hence,  also,  Harris's  righteously  de- 
fiant look  and  the  complacency  of  his  announce- 
ment, "They  don't  think  that  we  can  re-elect  you." 
He  was  the  meek  bearer  of  the  bowstring. 

The  condemned  man  took  a  few  turns  up  and 
down  the  room,  paused  before  a  window,  turned 
suddenly,  and  said:  "When  you  look  out  that 
window  and  see  the  upper  town — up  there  on  the 
Hill — you  see  it  as  the  abode  of  decency  and  virtue 
and  everything  that's  godly.  And  you  see  it  warred 
on  by  the  vice  of  the  lower  town — where  everything 
is  sin.  Don't  you?" 

Harris  did  not  answer.  He  laid  aside  his  hat  on 
the  table  and  crossed  his  arms,  settling  himself  to 
hear  an  argument  and  reply  to  it  as  soon  as  he  had 
heard  it  all. 

"When  I  look  out  that  window,"  the  District 
Attorney  continued,  "I  see  the  upper  town  as  the 
abode  chiefly  of  the  men  who  keep  the  lower  wards 
living  in  the  dirt  and  the  evil  conditions  that  breed 
sin.  I  see  the  lower  town  working  in  conditions  of 
pollution  to  pay  the  money  that  makes  the  Hill 
rich — decent — respectable.  That's  the  difference 
between  us.  And  there  doesn't  seem  to  be  any  way 
of  reconciling  it." 

His  office  was  on  the  sixth  floor  of  the  Settle 
Building.  He  could  look  down  on  the  roofs  of  half 
the  city  in  the  morning  sunlight.  "It  isn't  vice 
that  I  want  to  fight  any  more,"  he  said.  "It's  the 
conditions  that  make  vice." 

[814] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

"And  yet/'  Harris  retorted,  "you  admit,  I  sup- 
pose, that  there  may  be  such  a  thing  as  'honest 
poverty '?" 

Wickson  wheeled  on  him.  "I'll  go  farther.  I'll 
admit  that  there  may  be  such  a  thing  as  honest 
wealth." 

Harris  spread  his  hands.  "I  don't  wish  to  think," 
he  said,  "that  you've  lost  your  faith  in  the  spirit- 
ualities. I  don't  wish  to  believe  that  you've  be- 
come wholly  a  materialist.  God  has  manifested 
Himself  in  your  work."  And  Harris  could  say 
these  things  without  any  trace  of  cant,  hi  a  voice 
full  of  conviction.  "You've  been  a  great  power  for 
good,  but  in  struggling  against  the  evils  of  this 
world  I  think  you're  forgetting  to  rely  on  the  sav- 
ing grace  that  can  alone  work  the  miracle  of 
regeneration  in  the  soul  of  evil." 

"I  know."  Wickson  sighed.  "I  know.  You're 
sincere.  You  believe  it.  There's  no  use  in  arguing." 

"There  is  nothing  to  argue,"  Harris  said,  pontif- 
ically.  "It  is  so." 

Wickson  ran  his  hand  through  his  hair — a  rough 
shock  of  hair  that  had  grown  sparse  in  a  dry  tangle. 
He  sat  down  again  at  his  desk.  "Well,"  he  said, 
"they  don't  think  I  can  be  re-elected,  eh?  They 
tell  you  'the  boys'  won't  vote  for  me — the  rank 
and  file.  I've  made  too  many  enemies.  Some  of 
our  own  friends  don't  like  my  remarks  about  the 
connection  between  street-railway  franchises  and 
protected  vice.  Bill  Toole — and  it  comes,  I  sup- 

[315] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


pose,  from  old  Bradford  himself — BUI  Toole  offers 
to  compromise  on  a  good  ticket  if  I'm  dropped." 

"No!"  Harris  cried.    "No!    That's  not  true." 

"Not  in  so  many  words.  Of  course  not!  But  if 
you  insisted  on  having  me  on  the  ticket  it  would 
come  to  that.  Isn't  that  so?  Isn't  it?" 

"I  don't  believe  you  could  possibly  be  re-elected." 

"We  didn't  believe,  in  the  first  place,  that  I 
could  be  elected.  Yet  we  made  the  fight." 

"There's  no  necessity  of  running  any  such  risk. 
We're  to  have  the  nomination  for  the  office.  We'll 
pick  a  good  man." 

Wickson  took  up  some  papers  on  his  desk.  "If 
it  were  only  a  question  of  the  office,"  he  said,  "I'd 
be  glad  to  get  out.  But  there's  more  than  that. 
There's —  However,  it's  useless  for  us  to  talk. 
You'll  have  to  excuse  me.  I'm  busy."  He  unfolded 
a  sheet  of  typewriting  and  pushed  the  button  for 
his  stenographer. 

As  McPhee  Harris  reached  for  his  silk  hat  he 
looked  down  on  ingratitude  coldly.  "I  expected 
as  much,"  he  said.  "Good  morning." 

Wickson  did  not  reply.  He  allowed  Harris  to 
go  out  of  his  life  as  he  had  passed  his  father  in  the 
field,  plowing. 

His  stenographer  answered  the  bell,  and  without 
raising  his  eyes  he  muttered,  "Get  me  Collins  on 
the  'phone." 

The  clerk  replied,  "He's  been  waiting  here  to 
see  you." 

[316] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

Wickson  tossed  aside  the  sheet  eagerly.  "Send 
him  in." 

8 

There  was  nothing  personal  in  the  furnishings 
of  Wickson's  room — an  official  desk-table,  some 
bare  chairs,  some  framed  photographs  of  men  and 
buildings  on  the  walls,  and  beyond  that  not  even 
a  bookcase.  There  was  nothing  characteristic 
about  his  "ready-made"  clothes  that  hung  on  him 
as  if  then*  one  purpose  was  to  impede  his  impatient 
movements.  And  in  his  interview  with  McPhee 
Harris  he  had  been  impersonal,  withdrawn,  and  as 
colorless  as  his  surroundings. 

But  now,  to  receive  the  detective,  there  came  a 
relaxing  in  the  muscles  of  his  mouth  and  a  medi- 
tative widening  of  the  eyes.  He  pushed  his  papers 
back  from  him.  He  began  to  beat  a  tattoo  on  his 
desk  blotter,  looking  aside  out  of  the  window  and 
allowing  his  mind  to  rove  with  his  eyes.  It  was 
evident  that  the  detective  gave  him  a  sense  of 
security. 

Collins  entered,  hat  in  hand,  closed  the  door 
behind  him,  and  crossed  to  a  chair  with  a  peculiar 
noiseless  placidity.  He  was  plump,  clean-shaven, 
commonplace,  with  mild  and  rather  vacant  brown 
eyes,  broad-shouldered,  short,  and  slow.  He  might 
have  been  the  proprietor  of  a  commercial  travelers' 
hotel.  He  did  not  look  genial  enough  to  be  a  saloon- 
keeper, yet  he  had  the  sort  of  figure  that  you  would 

1317] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


associate  with  barroom  tables  or  the  chairs  of  hotel 
lobbies.  He  had  the  bronze  button  of  a  fraternal 
order  on  his  lapel  and  a  masonic  trinket  on  his 
watch-chain.  There  was  nothing  whatever  about 
him  to  suggest  the  detective  of  popular  tradition. 

Yet  he  had  been  brought  from  Washington  by 
the  Purity  League  with  enough  scalps  on  his  official 
belt  to  give  him  a  reputation  in  those  circles  where 
fame  can  have  no  notoriety.  He  was  rated  by  Wick- 
son  as  "the  only  real  detective  I  ever  knew."  And 
he  had  performed  miracles  for  the  District  Attorney. 

He  turned  his  chair  to  face  the  door  and  sat  down 
squarely  with  his  hands  spread  on  his  knees.  He 
said:  "They  tell  me  Madge  was  down  at  Head- 
quarters the  day  before  yesterday.  She's  keeping 
Cooney.  He's  out  again.  They're  using  her  to 
frame  it  up  with  him  to  bump  you  off." 

That  is  to  say,  he  told  Wickson  that  at  Police 
Headquarters  they  were  arranging  to  have  the 
District  Attorney  murdered  by  an  ex-policeman 
named  Cooney  whom  Wickson  had  prosecuted 
and  sent  to  prison. 

Wickson  raised  one  eyebrow  at  him,  smiling 
wryly.  "Tim,"  he  said,  "McPhee  Harris  has 
slumped  on  me." 

Collins  repeated:  "They're  going  to  try  to  bump 
you  off.  They've  got  Cooney  worked  up  to  it. 
They're  keeping  him  just  drunk  enough  to  do  it. 
He's  going  to  shoot  you.  That's  what  he's  hang- 
ing around  the  court-house  for." 

[318] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

In  the  earlier  days  of  their  work  together  Wick- 
son  might  have  asked,  "Are  you  sure?"  or  "How 
do  you  know?'*  But  he  had  long  since  learned  that 
Collins  never  spoke  till  he  was  sure  and  that  the 
means  by  which  he  made  sure  were  not  open  to 
inspection.  He  kept  his  sources  of  information 
secret  from  Wickson,  even. 

"When  you  challenged  that  juror  yesterday," 
Collins  said,  "you  noticed  how  pale  Sotjie  got? 
Well,  he  didn't  turn  pale  because  he  lost  the  man. 
He  turned  pale  because  Cooney  had  come  in  behind 
you.  He  was  afraid  that  Cooney  was  going  to  shoot. 
That's  what  gave  me  the  tip — the  way  Sotjie's 
hands  shook.  I've  given  orders  to  our  boys  to 
keep  Cooney  outside  the  rail  after  this.  Plummer 
will  trail  along  with  you." 

The  Sotjie  of  whom  he  spoke  was  the  chief  of 
police.  He  was  under  indictment  on  charges  of 
corruption  in  office;  Wickson  was  prosecuting  him; 
his  trial  had  begun;  and  the  detective  had  dis- 
covered that,  in  order  to  escape  prosecution  by 
Wickson,  the  chief  of  police  was  conspiring  with 
the  ex-policeman,  Cooney,  to  have  Wickson  shot. 

Wickson  considered  for  a  moment  the  incredi- 
bility of  such  a  plot.  "The  strangest  part  about 
it  is,"  he  said,  "that  these  fellows  are  able  to  do 
these  things  just  because  no  decent  citizen  would 
believe  it  possible.  It's  a  funny  situation.  You 
can't  go  out  and  cry  'Help!'  because,  if  you  did, 
everybody  would  think  you'd  gone  mad."  He 

[319] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


snorted  a  dry  laugh.  "Well,  I  don't  see  what  I 
can  do.  He  could  come  up  behind  me  on  the  street 
at  any  time." 

"No.    I  think  not,"  Collins  held. 

"Why  not?" 

"It  never  happens  that  way.  They  always  seem 
to  wait  for  you  somewhere  that  they  know  you'll 
come — and  work  themselves  up  to  it." 

Wickson  tipped  back  in  his  swivel-chair  and 
clasped  his  hands  behind  his  head.  "I'm  done, 
anyway,  Tim,"  he  said.  "Our  own  people  have 
gone  back  on  me.  They  don't  believe  they  can 
re-elect  me.  And  I  can't  win  without  their  sup- 
port. ...  I  don't  seem  to  be  able  to  make  them 
understand  what  the  game  is  in  this  town.  I  can't 
make  them  believe  it — any  more  than  we  could 
make  them  believe  that  Sotjie  was  putting  up 
Cooney  to  shoot  me."  He  swung  a  fist  down  on 
the  table.  "My  God!  If  we  could  only  make  them 
see  these  things." 

Collins  shook  his  nead  with  slow  finality. 

"We  can't,  of  course,"  Wickson  agreed.  "We 
can't  reach  them.  We  can't  make  them  believe  it. 
I  wouldn't  have  believed  it  myself  when  I  first 
came  in  here — hardly.  And  sometimes  I  wake  up 
at  night,  now,  and  wonder  if  I  haven't  been  dream- 
ing it." 

Collins  nodded  solemnly,  looking  at  his  feet. 

Wickson  began  to  pace  up  and  down  the  room 
again.  "Besides,"  he  asked,  with  an  air  of  relieving 

[320] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

his  mind  of  something  that  had  long  been  burden- 
ing it,  "what's  the  use  of  prosecuting  this  man 
Sotjie?  He's  not  to  blame.  The  town  has  to  have 
a  crooked  chief  of  police,  and  they'll  always  get 
some  one  who'll  do  what  Sotjie  did.  And  if  we 
could  reach  old  Bradford  and  the  *  higher-ups'  what 
would  be  the  use  of  prosecuting  them?  As  long  as 
these  public  utilities  are  lying  around  loose,  waiting 
for  some  one  to  steal  them,  they'll  be  stolen.  It's 
a  whole  community  that's  been  to  blame.  You 
can't  prosecute  a  whole  community.  And  prose- 
cuting a  man  like  Sotjie  is  like  prosecuting  a 
man  for  having  typhoid  fever — when  he  got  it 
drinking  from  a  city  tap!" 

Collins  looked  worried. 

"Of  course,  I  have  to  prosecute.  Just  as  you 
have  to  get  evidence.  That's  what  I'm  paid  for. 
That's  what  I'm  here  for.  And  if  they  shoot  me 
for  it  Bradford  and  the  rest  will  be  the  first  to  sign 
a  testimonial  to  my  good  character — so  that  they 
sha'n't  be  suspected  of  any  lack  of  public  spirit." 
He  laughed  rather  despairingly.  "It's  funny, 
isn't  it?"  He  sat  down.  "God!  I'm  tired  of  it!" 
he  said. 

The  "Bradford"  to  whom  he  referred  was  the 
great  William  D.  Bradford,  the  financial  "boss" 
of  the  town,  owner  of  the  street  railway,  the  gas 
company,  the  most  successful  newspaper,  one  of 
the  banks,  and  two  of  the  trust  companies. 

Collins  mused  behind  a  mask  of  mild  vacuity. 

[321] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


He  had  not  been  so  much  listening  to  Wickson's 
argument  as  considering  the  state  of  mind  that 
spoke  in  the  words.  He  indicated  his  conclusion 
when  he  replied,  "I'll  put  Plummer  on  your  door." 

If  he  had  spoken  out  that  conclusion  he  would 
have  said,  "You  probably  don't  much  care  whether 
you  get  shot  or  not,  just  at  present,  but  it's  my  busi- 
ness to  see  that  you're  protected." 

Wickson  did  not  understand — and  did  not  try 
to.  "Tim,"  he  asked,  "what  do  you  think  about 
things — the  way  they  are  in  this  town?  What  the 
devil  can  we  do?" 

The  detective  rubbed  his  palms  on  his  thick 
knees.  "I  guess,"  he  said,  "the  trouble  with  me  is 
I  don't  get  time  to  think — about  things — taking 
them  in  the  large.  I'm  too  busy  trying  to  dope  out 
what  the  other  fellows  are  thinking." 

"Well,  then,  what  do  you  suppose  they're  think- 
ing now?" 

"They're  thinking  they've  got  to  stop  you  from 
trying  this  case  against  Sotjie — if  they  can.  If 
you  go  ahead  you'll  mark  them  with  the  evidence 
you've  got  so  that  they'll  never  be  able  to  touch 
you  for  fear  of  making  the  town  too  hot  to  hold 
them.  And  if  you  go  ahead  they'll  maybe  lose  the 
election.  If  they're  going  to  stop  you  they've  got 
to  stop  you  now.  I  don't  think  they  want  to 
kill  you,  but  they  want  you  in  the  hospital  till 
after  elections.  That's  dead  sure.  You've  got  to 
be  careful." 

[322] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

It  was  Collins's  opinion  that  the  District  Attorney 
somewhat  lacked  the  instinct  of  self-preservation. 
He  admitted  that  Wickson  could  not  have  done 
his  peculiar  work  for  the  community  if  he  had  had 
that  instinct  very  highly  developed.  And  conse- 
quently he  accepted  as  natural  Wickson's  lack  of 
attention  to  the  warning  that  he  must  be  "careful." 

Wickson  had  glanced  at  his  desk  calendar,  at 
the  mention  of  elections — as  if  to  figure  out  how 
many  weeks  remained — had  turned  the  yester- 
day's leaf  to  arrive  at  the  day's  date,  and  had  found 
a  note  in  his  own  handwriting.  He  reached  at  once 
to  his  desk-telephone.  "Send  Arnett  in,"  he  di- 
rected, "as  soon  as  he  comes.  Yes."  .  .  . 

"He's  leaving  for  New  York  this  afternoon," 
he  explained  to  the  detective.  "I  promised  him  a 
letter."  He  began  to  scratch  squares  and  crosses 
on  his  blotter  with  a  dry  pen.  "Do  you  think 
Bradford  or  any  of  the  big  ones  know  about 
Cooney?" 

"Not  if  they  can  keep  from  knowing  it.  That's 
the  sort  of  thing  they  make  it  their  business  not 
to  know." 

"Come  in!"  Wickson  called  to  a  knock  at  the 
door.  And,  "Hello,  Jack!"  he  greeted  the  sculptor. 
"I  nearly  forgot  about  you.  What  time  does  your 
train  go?" 

"It  doesn't  go,"  Arnett  said,  taking  the  out- 
stretched hand.  "I'm  staying  to  do  a  portrait  bust 
of  old  Bradford." 

[323] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


"Bradford!" 

"On  an  order  that  Harris  got  me." 

"Bradford!"  Wickson  turned  to  enjoy  the  joke 
with  Collins,  but  the  detective  had  already  gone — 
inconspicuously — and  the  door  had  closed  behind 
him. 

9 

Arnett  sat  down  at  once,  on  his  shoulder-blades, 
in  the  loose-jointed  attitude  of  a  tall  man  whose 
work  kept  him  on  his  feet.  He  felt  in  his  pocket  for 
his  inevitable  pipe  and  hooked  it  into  the  corner  of 
his  mouth.  "I  sold  him  my  *  Nymph,'  too,"  he  said. 

He  was  as  unconsciously  individual  in  his  ap- 
pearance as  the  detective  had  been  consciously 
indeterminate — a  lank,  black-haired,  strong-handed 
man  in  clothes  that  showed  the  dust  and  plaster 
of  his  sculptor  studio  in  spite  of  brushing.  His 
eyes  were  wrinkled  from  a  puckered  scrutiny;  he 
watched  Wickson  (and  took  no  note  of  his  back- 
ground) with  a  professional  interest  in  the  human 
spirit  as  it  expressed  itself  in  the  flesh.  He  had  not 
seen  Wickson  for  months.  Their  careers  had  sep- 
arated them. 

"A  bust  of  Bradford !"  Wickson  laughed.  "That's 
great!  Do  you  ever  do  tombstones?" 

Arnett  sucked  his  cold  pipe  humorouslj.  "Are 
you  going  to  bury  some  one?" 

"No.    They're  going  to  bury  me." 

"What  for?" 

[324] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

"For  trying  to  can  Sotjie.  They  have  a  man  out 
to  shoot  me." 

Arnett  took  his  pipe  from  his  teeth  as  if  to  put 
aside  his  jocular  air  with  it.  "What's  up?  Do  you 
mean  it?" 

Wickson  nodded,  smiling. 

"Who's  doing  it?" 

"Well — Sotjie,  first  of  all.  And  then — the  men 
who  have  helped  to  make  Sotjie  what  he  is,  includ- 
ing Bradford.  And  then — all  of  us  who  have  al- 
lowed conditions  to  become  what  they  are  in  this 
town.  You,  for  instance.  You  never  vote,  do 
you?" 

"Murder?     You  mean  murder?" 

"No.  The  man  '11  be  drunk.  It's  a  fellow  I  sent 
up  three  years  ago,  and  he  has  that  grievance. 
It  '11  only  be  manslaughter." 

Arnett  stared  at  him.  "Are  you  growing 
fanciful?" 

"You'd  think  so,  wouldn't  you?" 

"Oh,  pshaw,  Wick!    I  don't  believe  it." 

Wickson  laughed.  "I  knew  you  wouldn't.  That's 
why  I  told  you."  He  began  to  gather  up  the  papers 
from  his  desk.  "The  devil  of  it  is  I  don't  want  to 
prosecute  Sotjie — I  don't  feel  that  he's  been  to 
blame — but  conditions  make  it  necessary.  And  I 
don't  suppose  he  wants  to  shoot  me — if  he  could 
avoid  it.  It's  a  gay  life.  Will  you  walk  over  to  the 
court  with  me?" 

Arnett  rose  silently,  dropped  his  pipe  into  his 

[325] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


pocket,  and  looked  a  long  time  at  the  lining  of  his 
hat  before  he  put  it  on.  "Why  don't  you  have 
him  arrested?" 

Wickson  patted  him  on  the  shoulder  and  turned 
him  to  the  door.  "We  can't  do  that  until  he 
shoots  me." 

"If  you  know  he's  going  to  shoot  you,  you  can 
prove  it." 

"You  think  so?"  He  turned  the  knob.  "There 
are  a  good  many  things  in  this  business  that  a  man 
knows  and  can't  prove." 

With  the  opening  of  the  door  the  activities  of 
the  outer  office  interrupted  them  and  silenced 
Arnett.  He  followed  or  waited  for  Wickson  as 
the  District  Attorney  excused  himself  to  a  visitor, 
gave  instructions  to  an  assistant,  bent  to  hear  a 
hurried  report  in  confidence,  or  stopped  to  "jolly" 
a  newspaper  man.  When  they  reached  the  elevator 
Collins's  young  detective,  Plummer,  was  with  them. 
He  stood  aside,  at  the  ground  floor,  and  followed 
them  out  to  the  street,  carefully  unalert,  with  the 
comprehensive  glances  of  an  apparently  idle  eye. 

"But  I  don't  get  this  thing  at  all,"  Arnett  com- 
plained, as  they  turned  up  the  street. 

Wickson  took  his  elbow.  "I'm  in  the  position 
of  a  policeman  in  a  thieves'  quarter — where  the 
political  boss  of  the  quarter  protects  them — in 
return  for  their  help  in  elections.  See?  Only  in 
this  case  the  whole  town  is  the  quarter,  and  Brad- 
ford is  the  political  boss,  and  he  hasn't  been  able 

[326] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

to  keep  me  from  bothering  the  thieves,  and  so  the 
thieves  are  going  to  'get'  me." 

"Oh,  come  off,"  Arnett  broke  in.  "Bradford 
isn't  that  bad." 

"Surely  not.  I'm  putting  it  very  crudely,  of 
course.  I'm  willing  to  believe  that  Bradford  doesn't 
see  it  that  way  at  all.  He  probably  feels  himself 
as  much  the  victim  of  conditions  as  I  do.  He'll 
tell  you  that  the  thieves  run  the  town — that  he 
has  to  operate  the  street  railway — and  that  he 
couldn't  operate  it  unless  he  stood  in  with  them. 
See?  He'll  tell  you  that  the  fault  is  with  the  citi- 
zens who  won't  be  bothered  with  politics — who 
leave  the  thieves  to  take  that  trouble.  But  you'll 
notice  that  when  I  try  to  rouse  those  citizens  to 
make  them  take  an  interest,  I  get  notice  from  Brad- 
ford, through  Bill  Toole  to  McPhee  Harris,  that  I 
can't  be  renominated." 

The  street  was  busy  with  trolley-cars,  wagons, 
hurrying  people,  and  the  displays  and  activities  of 
trade — the  business  of  a  life  from  which  Arnett's 
mind  was  as  much  withdrawn  as  any  artist's. 
Usually  he  walked  through  it  unseeingly,  hurry- 
ing to  escape  it.  He  looked  at  it  now  as  the  public 
life  in  which  Wickson  played  a  leading  part,  and 
blinked  at  it,  feeling  himself  asked  for  advice  about 
it,  and  bewildered  to  find  that  he  could  not  see 
below  its  shifting  surface.  He  shook  his  head. 

"I  don't  know.  I  don't  know  what  to  make  of 
it,"  he  complained. 

22  [327] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


"If  it  were  only  the  case  of  the  policeman  and 
the  thieves,"  Wickson  said,  at  the  court-house  steps, 
"it  might  be  a  good  thing  to  let  them  shoot.  If  it 
would  attract  attention  to  the  conditions —  But 
I  don't  want  them  simply  to  *  mangle*  me." 

Arnett  caught  him  by  the  sleeve,  alarmed  by 
the  very  matter-of-factness  of  his  tone.  "My  God! 
Wick!  You're  not  going  to  do  anything  so  foolish?" 

Wickson  smiled  slowly  at  him  in  a  sort  of  amused 
appraisal  of  his  horror.  "It  isn't  what  I'm  going 
to  do  that  counts.  It's  up  to  them.  I  have  to  go 
ahead  with  my  job.  However,  I  don't  believe  they'll 
dare.  .  .  .  You  run  along  now  and  get  to  work  on 
your  bust.  Come  in  and  tell  me  how  it  goes,  will 
you?  I  hope  you're  not  going  to  do  the  old  boy  in 
the  nude,  like  your  *  Nymph."1 

Arnett  laughed,  nervously  relieved  by  the  jocu- 
larity. "I  believe  Harris  got  me  the  order  so  I'd 
have  something  to  do  with  clothes  on.  He  thinks 
I  do  the  other  because  it  sells — such  being  the 
depravity  of  the  artistic  rich !" 

"Well,  good-by,"  Wickson  said.    "Be  good." 

"And  you  be  careful." 

-  Wickson  waved  his  hand  and  turned  up  the  steps. 
Arnett  brushed  against  the  nonchalant  Plummer 
as  he  hurried  off. 

And  half-way  down  the  block  the  sculptor  re- 
membered that  he  had  seen  this  same  man  in  the 
elevator — that  he  had  seen  him  pass  into  the  court- 
house, look  around  the  corridor  and  come  out. 

[328] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

And  now  he  was  following  Wickson  into  the  court- 
house again! 

He  hastened  back  with  a  frightened  suspicion 
that  in  Plununer  he  had  seen  the  assassin. 

10 

He  lost  himself  at  once  in  the  corridors  of  the 
ground  floor  of  the  court-house,  where  the  doors 
were  marked,  "County  Commissioners,'*  "Local 
Imp.,"  "Sheriff,"  on  the  yellowed  frosting  of  their 
glasses;  and  when  he  demanded  breathlessly  of  a 
passing  clerk,  "Where  '11 1  find  the  District  Attorney 
— Wickson?"  the  official  replied,  curtly,  "Settle 
Building,"  and  went  on  about  his  business. 

It  was  from  the  Settle  Building  that  Arnett  and 
Wickson  had  just  walked  to  the  court-house. 

He  blundered  upon  the  elevator  shaft  and  had 
to  wait  endlessly  for  the  cage  to  descend  to  him. 
The  elevator  man  replied  to  his  confused  explana- 
tions, "Second  floor.  First  door  to  your  right," 
and  held  him  despairing  in  the  cage  until  three  other 
passengers  came  one  by  one  at  their  leisure.  He 
had  the  feeling  of  a  man  in  a  nightmare  shouting 
for  help  to  people  who  passed  him  either  deaf  or 
horribly  indifferent.  And  it  was  as  if  he  had  wak- 
ened to  the  comforting  realities  when  he  came  to 
the  open  door  of  the  court-room  and  looked  over 
the  heads  of  the  spectators  on  their  benches  and 
saw  Wickson  talking  at  the  counsels'  table  with  a 
young  lawyer  in  spectacles.  His  suspected  assassin, 

[329] 


FROM    THE    LIFE 


Plummer,  was  nowhere  to  be  seen.  The  whole 
thing  had  evidently  been  a  ridiculous  false  alarm, 
and  Arnett  felt  suddenly  very  foolish. 

The  judge  had  not  yet  entered  from  his  chambers. 
There  were  only  three  jurors  in  the  jury-box — 
for  the  others  were  still  to  be  chosen  from  the 
panel.  A  buzz  of  low-voiced  conversation  hung 
over  the  groups  of  lawyers,  court  officers,  and 
privileged  spectators  within  the  rail;  and  those 
in  the  public  seats  coughed  and  scuffled  their  feet, 
uneasily  expectant.  In  the  light  of  high  windows 
the  room  was  shabbily  ugly,  with  walls  painted  a 
sort  of  greasy  robin's-egg  blue  and  its  cheap  fur- 
nishings worn  by  the  contact  of  innumerable 
bodies — as  repellent  as  a  prison,  as  sordid  as  the 
tragedies  that  had  soiled  it,  as  if  the  beautiful  ideals 
of  justice  had  left  it  to  be  a  place  only  for  the 
craftiness  of  statutory  law. 

Arnett  sat  down  in  a  back  seat,  intimidated  by 
the  crowd  of  strangers,  shy  of  his  intrusion  upon 
the  business  of  the  court,  and  vaguely  depressed 
by  the  commonplace  and  sordid  aspect  of  the 
reality  before  him.  He  was  an  idealist  in  art. 

He  sat  watching  Wickson.  The  detective,  Collins, 
was  also  watching  Wickson,  but  with  a  very  dif- 
ferent sort  of  eye. 

The  District  Attorney  was  consulting  with  an 
assistant  over  a  jury-list  of  typewritten  names, 
each  name  of  which  was  followed  by  a  few  brief 
notes  that  represented  Collins's  work  of  investiga- 
te] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

tion;  and  this  investigation  had  been  made,  with 
Collins's  usual  ingenious  audacity,  by  a  man  who 
had  pretended  to  be  working  for  the  city  directory. 
Collins  was  proud  of  the  job.  He  noticed  that 
Wickson  looked  at  it  without  interest,  absent- 
mindedly. 

He  was  again  aware  of  the  same  thing  in  Wick- 
son's  manner  that  had  worried  him  during  his  in- 
terview with  the  District  Attorney  when  they  had 
spoken  about  Cooney  and  the  police  plot.  Collins 
might  not  have  been  able  to  say  what  it  was  that 
worried  him,  any  more  than  Arnett  could;  yet  it 
had  worried  Arnett,  too,  though  it  had  expressed 
itself  to  him  in  Wickson's  air  of  genial  superiority 
to  the  sculptor.  And  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
it  was  this  dimly  felt  emotion  in  Wickson,  detached 
and  dangerous,  that  moved  him  to  involve  himself 
now  hi  the  final  catastrophe  of  the  day. 

While  Wickson  was  standing  inside  the  rail 
Cooney,  the  ex-policeman,  slunk  into  the  court- 
room and  loitered  there,  leaning  against  the  rear 
wall — a  disheveled,  unshaven,  blowsy  derelict  of  a 
man,  horrible,  but  pathetic.  Plummer  had  followed 
him  in,  and  Plummer  went  at  once  to  notify  Collins. 
He  tapped  Collins  on  the  shoulder  from  behind, 
and  Collins  turned  his  head  away  from  Wickson 
while  Plummer  whispered  in  his  ear. 

At  that  moment  Wickson  himself  saw  Cooney, 
and  saw  him  with  pity,  obviously,  and  with  a  desire 
to  aid  him.  He  said  a  word  of  excuse  to  his  assistant 

[331] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


for  leaving  the  jury-list,  passed  the  rail,  and  came 
down  the  court-room  aisle  toward  the  ex-policeman. 
He  came  toward  Arnett  also,  and  the  sculptor 
half  rose  from  his  seat  before  he  realized  that 
Wickson  was  not  aware  of  him.  There  was  a 
look  of  solemn  friendliness  and  sympathy  in  the 
District  Attorney's  face  as  he  went  by — a  look 
that  ignored  Arnett  and  yet  moved  him  to  turn 
and  watch. 

Wickson  put  his  hand  on  Cooney's  shoulder. 
"I'm  glad  to  see  you  out  again,  Cooney,"  he  said. 
"I've  been  mighty  sorry  for  what  happened.  I 
had  to  do  it.  We  all  have  to  do  things  sometimes 
that  we  don't  want  to  do.  But  if  I  can  help  you 
in  any  way  now,  I  want  to  know  it." 

Cooney  scowled  up  at  him  out  of  bloodshot  and 
befuddled  eyes,  dropped  the  puffed  lids  sulkily,  and 
muttered  something  unintelligible. 

"I've  never  felt  it  was  your  fault,"  Wickson 
went  on.  "I  know  what  it  is  to  be  a  policeman  in 
this  town.  I  know  what  the  conditions  are.  If 
you  think  of  any  way  that  I  can  help  you  to  make  a 
fresh  start,  come  and  see  me,  will  you?" 

Cooney  looked  up  again,  and  there  was  the  be- 
ginning of  a  maudlin  self-pity  in  his  bleary  gaze. 

"I  don't  want  to  fight  vice  any  more,"  Wickson 
said — with  his  absurd  seriousness  that  never  saw 
itself  incongruous  in  any  circumstances.  "I  want 
to  fight  the  conditions  that  make  vice." 

But  by  this  tune  Collins  had  seen  what  had  hap- 

[832] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY   WICKSON 

pened,  and  had  seen,  too,  the  danger  of  it.  "Look 
out!"  he  warned  Plummer. 

He  started  to  make  his  way  down  a  side  aisle 
so  as  to  reach  Cooney  from  the  flank.  Plummer, 
less  experienced,  started  hastily  down  the  center 
aisle  in  full  view  of  Cooney,  and  Cooney,  looking 
over  Wickson's  shoulder,  saw  the  detective  coming. 

Instantly  into  that  drunken  brain  there  must 
have  flashed  a  suspicion  that  Wickson  was  trying 
to  hold  him  with  a  show  of  friendliness  until  Plum- 
mer could  seize  and  search  him.  He  cursed  out  an 
oath,  and  threw  his  hand  back  to  his  hip  pocket. 
Plummer  saw  the  movement  and  plucked  out  his 
own  revolver.  Arnett  immediately  sprang  from 
his  seat  and  threw  himself  on  the  detective,  still 
mistaking  him  for  an  assassin.  At  the  same  moment 
Cooney 's  revolver  exploded  in  Wickson's  face  and 
Collins  shot  at  Cooney. 

The  ex-policeman  leaped  as  if  he  had  been  speared 
in  the  side,  and  fell,  screaming.  The  District  At- 
torney staggered  back  with  his  hands  to  his  face. 
Collins  caught  him.  "Are  you  hurt?" 

Wickson  relaxed  with  a  tired  sigh  that  slowly 
shuddered  down  to  a  choking  catch  in  the  throat 
where  the  blood  strangled  it. 

11 

At  the  mass-meeting  of  indignant  citizens  who 
gathered  to  pass  resolutions  upon  this  "irremediable 
loss  to  the  community  "  a  subscription  was  started 

[333] 


FROM   THE    LIFE 


to  pay  for  a  "suitable  memorial"  of  the  tragedy; 
and  the  list  of  subscribers,  as  published  in  the  morn- 
ing paper,  began  magnificently  with  the  names  of 
William  D.  Bradford  and  McPhee  Harris.  It  was 
Bradford,  as  president  of  the  Wickson  Memorial 
Committee,  who  formally  handed  over  the  com- 
pleted monument  to  the  Mayor  at  its  unveiling; 
and  he  stood,  proudly  modest,  on  the  wooden 
platform,  before  the  transfixed  figure  of  Wickson 
turned  to  bronze,  while  the  Mayor  felicitated  him- 
self and  the  city  upon  "the  possession  in  our  midst 
of  a  citizen  whose  public  spirit  puts  him  always 
in  the  forefront  of  every  public  movement  to — 
to  beautify,  to — to  elevate — to  raise  the  tone  of 
our  public  life  both  by  his  private  benefactions 
and  his  activity  as  a  citizen  of  the  public  life  of 
our  city." 

Wickson's  white-haired  mother,  a  little  deaf,  on 
the  back  row  of  the  platform  seats,  heard  the 
burst  of  applause,  thought  the  Mayor  was  speak- 
ing of  her  son,  and  wiped  a  flattered  tear  from  her 
cheek. 

The  bronze  face  of  her  son,  above  them  all, 
remained  exaltedly  impassive.  Arnett  had  done 
him  from  his  early  photographs,  before  worry  and 
illness  had  hardened  the  lines  of  his  face.  He 
stood  on  his  granite  pedestal,  sacrificially  erect, 
with  one  arm  doubled  across  the  small  of  his  back 
to  grasp  the  other  at  the  elbow  in  a  characteristic 
attitude  that  made  him  look  as  if  he  were  waiting  to 

[334] 


DISTRICT-ATTORNEY    WICKSON 

be  shot,  with  his  arms  pinioned,  his  chin  held  high, 
confronting  eternity.  At  the  foot  of  his  pedestal 
a  bronze  "Grief*  crouched,  weeping  in  her  hair. 

It  was  McPhee  Harris  who  started  the  public 
protest  against  the  semi-nudity  of  this  crouching 
figure.  Fortunately  the  protest  failed  of  effect. 
Arnett's  "Grief"  is  now  rather  more  widely  known 
than  Wickson  himself.  It  will  probably  be  famous 
to  a  posterity  that  will  have  no  very  accurate 
knowledge  of  the  event  which  the  memorial  was 
erected  to  commemorate. 


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